The underlying factors that drive and produce the outcomes of these two systems makes me think your comparison is a false equivalence. I guess there's an eleme

The underlying factors that drive and produce the outcomes of these two systems makes me think your comparison is a false equivalence. I guess there's an element of randomness to everything and any company could go under overnight, but in general I think you can rely on hindsight in terms of performance. The higher you get up the ladder and aggregate, the more stable I feel that is. If you're just comparing the methodology of extrapolating expected returns from hindsight I would agree with you. I guess what I'm saying is using hindsight to pick a direction seems logical. And doing it from a broad perspective seems more stable (using hindsight to predict if a company will go up vs using hindsight to estimate if a sector ETF will go up). However, I agree that I don't think you can estimate how much it will go in that direction. There's probably a fallacy in my logic there somewhere. But the results in the real world are good. If those returns are all just luck, well at least I had fun and made some money.