Yep, I was in a similar position and feel exactly the opposite. I was short a ton of these retail positions. I remember a guy who used to be CFO of a clothing

Yep, I was in a similar position and feel exactly the opposite. I was short a ton of these retail positions. I remember a guy who used to be CFO of a clothing retailer telling me earnestly that I was an utter idiot, and didn't understand another clothing retailer (we were short, he was long in massive size). And he was right...I didn't understand the business, I didn't understand as much as him about selling clothes. But I understood the things that mattered: they had bad locations, footfall was tracking down 3% YoY, and wasn't going to recover (they declared bankruptcy three years later, the CFO owned it all the way down and lost his shirt...he was an "expert" after all). Hindsight tells us what information is important. But people rarely try to work this out ahead of time. They gather whatever information is most available (usually from the company), but not what is most important. In addition, I think people who end up in investing rarely think through why other people make decisions. They come up with lots of clever reasons to own dogshit stocks but never consider that no-one is going to use that same reasoning (with retailers, the issue was rarely that people were expecting a recovery...they were buying the company of today expecting things to not get worse...but no-one buys into that situation without doing a lot of research to confuse themselves). So...imo, it was obvious although not easy or common. Most of the time, you can't get the important information. And most of the time, you can't get someone to take the other side. But it does happen. And most professionals vastly over-complicate investing. (Also, the OP is not bad...but it is just confused. Credit card data hasn't moved us to some new level of efficiency, his source for this isn't apples to apples as hedge funds today are nothing like hedge funds two decades ago. Markets aren't more efficient, they are just composed of actors who behave differently. In particular, the rise of factor models has opened huge inefficiencies because they are trying to trade fundamentally with no knowledge of fundamentals...this is something that is obviously bad and flawed).