This is a comforting and sensible stance, which is useful for most people and most situations. But you can't rule out the possibility that a few people, who hap

This is a comforting and sensible stance, which is useful for most people and most situations. But you can't rule out the possibility that a few people, who happen to be positioned exactly right at a particular point in time, correctly assess the risk of a certain bet as being much lower than the rest of the market thinks. Gamestop is a good example of this, as was Tesla at multiple points in its history. As was put options on major stock indexes in early February of 2020. And so on. It's very comforting to assess market events as truly random and any success as luck. It's possible to come up with definitions that lead to this conclusion. Personally, I'm fairly certain that this is wrong. But the distinctions are practically by definition so subtle that they seem random to anything but detailed, correctly-informed scrutiny. I'm not saying that you could build a long-term successful career out of this, where you make likely-successful trades every day. But I do claim that you could fruitfully dedicate part of a long-term portfolio -- say 10% -- to make speculative bets on the very occasional situations where you happen to be positioned to see something that isn't yet obvious to others.