The contradiction
Index funds are the right answer. So why do I pick stocks?
An honest answer to the obvious objection to this entire website.
This site has a contradiction sitting in the middle of it, and you should hear it from me rather than notice it yourself and conclude I'm a fraud.
On the one hand: the field guide tells you that your savings rate decides your retirement date, that fees compound against you, and that a low-cost index fund is the correct default for almost everybody. On the other hand: I publish a nine-page research report on a single stock, with a price target, every Monday.
Those two things do not obviously belong on the same website. So here's the honest version.
The evidence is not on my side
Start with the part that hurts. The case against picking stocks isn't really about intelligence or effort. It's structural, and it's arithmetic.
Stock returns are wildly skewed. The market's long-run return isn't the average of a normal spread of outcomes — it's driven by a small minority of enormous winners dragging up a large majority of mediocrities and disasters. The median stock does worse than the index. That's not a slur on the median stock; it's what a skewed distribution means.
Now think about what that does to a concentrated portfolio. If a small fraction of names produce most of the gains, then any portfolio holding a handful of stocks is overwhelmingly likely to miss them. Not because you picked badly — because there simply aren't many to hit, and you only bought a few tickets. The index wins not by being clever but by refusing to miss. It owns the winners by definition.
An index fund is a bet that you can't identify the winners in advance. Stock picking is a bet that you can. One of those bets requires you to be right. The other only requires you to show up.
Add the second layer: most professional active managers, with teams and terminals and access to management, underperform their benchmark over long horizons after fees. These are people doing it full-time with more resources than you or I will ever have. The base rate for the retail stock picker doing it on evenings and weekends is not better than theirs.
If you find that argument persuasive — and you should, because it's correct — then the honest conclusion is: buy the index, automate it, and go and live your life. You may stop reading here. Genuinely. That advice is worth more than any report on this site.
So why do I do it anyway?
Three reasons. Only two of them are good.
One: it is a sleeve, not the plan. The index fund is the plan. It is the boring, automated, majority of the thing, and nothing on this site is an argument against it. Single stocks are a satellite — a capped allocation I could lose entirely without changing my retirement date. That cap is the whole safety mechanism. If a stock idea can move your FI date, the position is too big, and you have quietly stopped investing and started gambling with extra steps.
Two: reading filings makes you better at everything adjacent. Learning to read a 10-K, trace cash through a business, and notice when a management team is dressing something up is a durable skill. It makes you harder to sell to. It makes you better at judging your own employer, your own compensation package, your own side business. The research is worth doing even in years the picks add nothing, because the reading compounds even when the portfolio doesn't.
Three, and this is the weak one: I enjoy it. I find it genuinely interesting to sit with a business for a week and figure out what the market is missing. That's a real motivation and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But enjoyment is not an edge. If the honest reason you hold single stocks is that index funds are boring, then be precise about what that means: you're paying for entertainment, and the price is whatever you underperform by. That's allowed. Just don't file it under "investing strategy" — file it under "hobby budget", and size it like one.
What would make me wrong
This is the test I'd apply to anyone writing about stocks, including me: can they tell you what would make them wrong? If they can't, it isn't research. It's advocacy with a chart.
So: if, after several years, the coverage board on the front page shows my calls collectively lagging a plain index fund — and it will be there in public, with the price on the day of each call, whether it flatters me or not — then the correct conclusion is that the picking added nothing, and I should stop. The board exists precisely so that conclusion is available to you, not just to me.
That's why every report gets a date, a reference price, and a number. A price target nobody ever marks to market isn't analysis. It's marketing.
The bottom line
If you take one thing from this site, don't take the ticker. Take the savings rate. Take the fee arithmetic. Take the compounding curve and the fact that 57% of a thirty-year balance shows up in the final decade. Those things are close to certain, they're free, and they'll do more for your net worth than any single stock I will ever write about.
The research is the interesting part. It is not the important part. I'd rather be honest about the difference than sell you the exciting one.