At the end of the day all stock market returns come from one's of 3 things:
Dividends
Earnings per Share growth
Multiple expansion
Over the long run the speculation that you so decry ( which amounts to Multiple expansion) has a negligible impact (less than 1%).
Sure you have plenty of short term booms and busts, but over the long term they are really irrelevant.
None of which really reflect reality, and rely on basically pure speculation.
They also depend on the stock to go up up up up.
> Over the long run the speculation that you so decry ( which amounts to Multiple expansion) has a negligible impact (less than 1%).
Over the long run stocks are just speculation.
Dividends (especially for companies with a long track record of paying and increasing them) are reality as far as I can tell.
Stock PICKing is speculative because we can’t predict the future. But that doesn’t mean that the future is unhinged from underlying fundamentals.