20 years ago AAPL was an absolute dog of a stock. It had underperformed the market for years. For the layperson AMZN was hard to distinguish from WebVan or pets.com.
Good on you for identifying their value at the time and getting rich, but it's not something everyone can do.
Yea Amazon was an easy bet back in the 90's clearly that bookshop would move into selling everything, optimizing warehousing and start the biggest cloud computing service. Oh hold on...
Sure it is. I’ve been investing in stocks and funds since high school in the early 90s with summer job money, and beat the indexes 22/25 years.
People buy and sell houses all of the time and find ways to make money. It’s no different with securities, and the bizarre position that responsible investing for individuals consists of being actively ignorant is gross.
Index investing is a valid, useful tool. It should not be a quasi-religion.
You make it sound simple, and you probably are a skilled investor. Again, good for you!
But you have to realize you're essentially saying "Why can't everyone be better than average?" It's great thing to aspire to but most people won't be better than average. Anyone can, everyone can't.
Good on you for identifying their value at the time and getting rich, but it's not something everyone can do.