Sophisticated money is generally not. The average retail investor absolutely is. Most retail investors invest based on emotion not on fact. A lot of tech company employees justify their emotions as providing them an edge because they're in the industry, but they often likewise get hung up on factors that they find emotionally relevant but aren't actually market relevant factors.

Look at this other comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39222007 in this thread. A lot of it is just idle speculation based on the commenter's personal values. These are the analyses that drive retail investors to invest. I don't mean to pick on this commenter specifically; I just felt it to be very illustrative of the kind of analysis that the average tech person does to justify or not justify an investment.

Investing is about reading the facts, not the tea leaves. Sometimes the facts aren't enough to predict the future. See Bill Ackman trying to catch Netflix falling and exiting at a loss soon after: https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/bill-ackman-sells-netf...

Had a decade ago you bought and held the FAMNG index of companies, you would have beat pretty much every hedge fund and active manager, save for Renaissance Technologies....