Granted that based on probability alone he just got lucky but from the details of the story it's not possible to be certain of that.
If he can offer a narrative about why and how he knew such a move would have such a result and the narrative fits with reality, then how is he not correct? Yes you can get both lucky and tragically unlucky when it comes to investments, but that doesnt mean there's no such thing as a rational investment with a high payoff. It's not impossible that's what he did, people do it, it does happen.
Yes, in any cohort of investors, by nature some random sample or going to outperform in any given year. In fact, statistically the concept of "hot hands" will rear its head because.. some subset of the outperformers will actually outperform over multiple years.
It may be skill, it may be luck, or it may be both.
But consider that this outperformance & hot-hand phenomenon can be replicated even in purely random games like coin flipping.
So sometimes taking the "winners" and trying to craft narratives of why they succeeded and what you should do to replicate them is a silly game.
I get what you mean and I agree to an extent, but to give an absurd example, if you knew of a company that had a patent on cold fusion, and you had watched it actually work yourself and deployed it at scale in a project successfully, investing in such a venture and having an outsized return would have absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with probability.
For sure!
The point is that simply replication the behavior of winners is not any guarantee of winning.
Replicating SOME of the behaviors of SOME winners, upon careful study of what in their process actually allows them to differentiate themselves from others is the key, and is usually a process that requires a lot more work.
The work here was that they had some sort of investment process that required time & effort evaluating projects & their prospects over long time horizons. These sorts of processes require entire investment teams and are not the sort of thing that make it into their Fortune magazine blurb or pithy twitter posts.
The process cannot be summarized in a paragraph blurb, and even if you were to read a 300 page book you may not have the man-hours, technical skills or knowledge to replicate it.
