There is so much wrong in this post.
> People keep telling me this, but I keep beating the market.
"Humans keep telling me it's hard to predict football games, but if you just squeeze your tentacles up and down enough you will get it right as I did"
-- Paul the Octopus, who predicted all world game results
There are millions of people trying to predict the market. Of course there will be people that did good, and these people (such as yourself) will all be convinced that they got it right for a reason.
But individual experiences mean nothing against the law of large numbers. You yourself have no way to know whether you're good or lucky, unless you show us an algorithm that consistently achieves the results you claim to enjoy.
Remember these simple facts:
- the less you trade, the further away you are from your real average predictive power. If the game is a coin toss and you play 2 times, there is a 25% chance that you get a 100% success rate, and go to HN to boast about how guessing a coin flip is easy. Try to keep that performance after 5000 games and it's an other story.
- Are you able to compute your idiosyncratic returns correctly? Can you show us that your portfolio returns, once residualized on sector, country and beta, are actually any better than a random pick?
- You pretty much only talk about good old common sense fundamental quality / value, which is far from being a major part of equity returns. You reasoning will work for one stock, and not for an other one. A sime value based strategy as you describe is vastly negative on a 20 year period - in absolute terms (not even compared to the market).
- You seem to have no understanding of diversification, and idiosyncratic risk. Companies can fail for an infinite amount of reasons. The less positions you have, the more sensible to "single company failure risk" you are exposed to. Very good companies, with solid earning and projections, did fail on the past, for reasons such as "top management scandal", "defective line of product", "banned from operations in a country", etc etc.
To anyone reading this comment, just remember that 90% of stocks returns do NOT come from the company itself. It comes from the drive of the market or sector as a whole. By investing in broad index funds you lower your specific risk, and get overall exposure to what drives the vast majority of the stock returns.