> The legions of Harvard and MIT quants working on Wall Street are going to be better than you at figuring out what the stock price should be. This is not comp

> The legions of Harvard and MIT quants working on Wall Street are going to be better than you at figuring out what the stock price should be. This is not completely true. Legions of Harvard quants most likely do not possess your circle of competence, whatever it may be. E.g. as a customer of various cloud services I am much better positioned than any quant at understanding cloud vendor's product and business, because I'm a user and customer so I can understand how some offerings are just better than others and I can safely predict winners in long term. You could likely predict AWS meteoric rise as a sysadmin in 2010. E.g.2 people following the semiconductor market in depth knew from years that Intel was on its way down since the blatant issue of the 10nm node appeared in 2015+ and had many years to act on it. As a MBP Pro user yourself you could quickly see that the boiling hot trackpad burning your fingers combined with Apple's declared intention of moving to in house socs, combined with the comeback of AMD in data center market combined with cloud vendors working on their own socs put Intel more and more in the corner. And what did quants do? Kept buying Intel because they looked at balance sheets, not products. Everyone has its circle of competence and can combine it with learning balance sheets and do their math. Point is almost no one does and does not go through the analysis part to value and price a business. Finance moreover changed. 30%+ of stocks out there are held by passive funds. Even investment managers which are consistently pressured to stay in a delta from the benchmarks. Investment opportunities are out there, what is needed is to practice continuous due diligence, stay in own's circle of competence and be patient. You can't be right consistently for the reasons you listed, but you only need to get it right few times.