He forgot one: the death of defined benefit retirement plans. Back when people knew that their pension + Social Security could allow them to retire with at least a decent lifestyle, nobody needed to care about the stock market. Only rich people needed to work with stock brokers.
Take all that away and force people to fund their own retirement with 401(k)'s and IRAs, and now people are interested in what the market is doing. This is typically to their detriment, since people want to sell when the market drops, rather than buy and hold. Continuing to buy and hold quality index funds is certainly the easiest way to generate wealth over a time period of 15-20+ years, but it's not very comfortable psychologically in the short term.
> Many “smart money” investors don’t rationalize investments by talking about the fundamentals of the business, or even conviction in its future. Instead, we’ve seen the emergence of chartism, which advocates for investing not based on where the business is today or where it’s headed, but its likeness to a “cup and handle” or “head and shoulders” pattern. This is the astrology of finance.
I've said this before, except I typically call technical analysis "numerology for smart people who should know better." Its only real saving grace is that it tends to capture momentum, which is one of the known and fairly reliable ways to generate alpha.