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Comment by nodesocket | Hacker News Reader

There was a young, incredibly well spoken, and intelligent analyst on Mad Money last week from JP Morgan (Matthew Boss) who leads retail coverage for $JPM. He went on to explain that they buy satellite time and point it down at malls and count the traffic going in and out of the malls to make forecasts. Individual investors have no chance against that in terms of market data, but that's fine. Let them over analyze, over trade, and underperform.

EDIT: Just found a link to the full video interview. Worth a watch:

http://video.cnbc.com/gallery/?video=3000611847

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>Let them over analyze, over trade, and underperform.

There was an interesting discussion on HN a week ago about how passive investors rely on active investors to keep prices in the market in line with their true value.

If you look at the long term (10 years) and just bought and held a common consumer company, the gains are impressive.

  10 Years
  Amazon - 1,367%
  Apple - 907%
  Google - 265%
  Microsoft - 126%
  Intel - 71%
  Coke - 65%
  Ford - 42%

There were a lot of other common consumer companies 10 years ago, too, like Sears. It's always easier in hindsight. I've been struggling with this problem in terms of picking my "blue chip" stocks to backtest -- my gains are impressive, but I doubt it was so obvious that these were blue chip stocks 10 years ago, or that these same blue chip stocks would be considered blue chips in 10 years.

You've just cherry-picked companies that have performed well, you could easily have MySpace instead of GOOG.

Or General Motors instead of Ford, and you'd have lost the entire investment in 2009.

Myspace was never public. Go back into your bunker with gold bars.

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