Professional investors have been badly outperformed by retail investors who simply bought and held well-known tech stocks over the past 15 years.
Michael describes talking to a friend who bought Google 10 years ago and held it, noting this retail investor has beaten professional managers. He argues this has been a 'first level thinking market' where buying household names was sufficient, making professional stock-picking largely unnecessary. ✦ AI generated
Michael · The Compound · 2026-08-19 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 35:05
There's a lot of professional investors who want this era of the best and most well-known companies beating everything. People want need that era to end. They need it to end, right? This idiot just bought five tech stocks and he's killing me... my friend let's just call my friend the average investor who bought Google 10 years ago and just held it... Has beaten the And there's so many investors like that that have beaten the absolute living out of quote professional investors, right?... The story over the last 15 years is that to beat the market, all you had to do was buy the big names that every Joemo has heard of. No need for any satellite imagery, data, sophisticated algorithms, or complicated Excel models. It's been a very interesting 15-year period where the professionals have gotten smoked.
verbatim transcript · starts at 35:05
34:45he sounded like every retail investor and I don't mean that pjoratively at all. Okay. He sounds like every retail investor who's done extraordinarily well over the last 15 years. And I know Ben, you said there's some people that want a recession. There's a lot of professional investors who want this era of the best and most well-known companies beating everything. People want need that era to end. They need it to end,
35:10>> right? This idiot just bought five tech stocks and he's killing me. I can't believe this. >> So my friend and let's just call my friend the average investor who bought Google 10 years ago and just held it. And when I say just extraordinarily hard to do, I didn't do it. So I'm not putting them down. Has beaten the And there's so many investors like that that have beaten the absolute living
35:31out of quote professional investors, >> right? >> Okay. And there's nothing that I could do to assu to to to convince him that this is >> You were just about to use a big word there and you stopped yourself. >> Assuage. >> Yes. >> Was I was I was I about to use it right? I was like 50/50. >> Yeah. Keep going. >> Okay. there's nothing I could say to
35:53convince him that this has been a really um good market environment. And I think what he hears is and I'm like, dude, I'm not like wagging my finger at you and saying that like I could like I'm a better investor trading than you are. That's not what I'm saying. And I'm definitely not trying to scare people into investing in index funds and needing to hire a financial adviser.
36:12That's not my that's like not my stick. I would I would encourage people to invest however they invest. And it doesn't matter if you beat the market. Just put your money in the market what you can afford to save for your future. That's like my whole MMO Ben is save for the future. Whether you beat the market, whether you're I'm smart or better trading, it does doesn't matter. But it
36:31is an interesting thing because I do think I was thinking about this. Well, in what environment can the retail investor lose to us? Can we say I I know for a fact that I will be the the average quote no nothing investor and it would have to be in a bare market where buying a dip no longer works because I know that if I'm investing in a bare market I'm not going to get blown
36:55up. If the market's down 30% I can be down 30%. If the market's down 30% I won't be down 70%. >> Right? The guy in the leverage the three times leveraged NASDAQ fund is going to be down 80%. I also think that just a a different market environment and maybe these don't exist anymore but value stocks work, dividend stocks work, international stocks work and those things are working but if they like
37:17really worked as tech stocks got smoked for a long period of time that's the period that's the time where >> so that's that's the environment that all the Buffett acolytes are dying for. >> Yeah, >> I don't care. I like we don't we don't need that. Um so anyway, we also was on this beat this week. He tweeted, "What is true is that an individual trader going up against pros will have a hard