You've got to be careful about that, too: how does one select among crowds to see which are successful, and which are not? If you pick only the "successful crowds," then the comparison is a priori biased, and likely invalid.
Friedrich Hayek predicted the fall of Communism based on the premise that a few people couldn't even access, much less properly process, the amount of information inherent in an economy.
His big insight was that the free market works better, because it allows huge numbers of people to make small decisions on things they know about, and they don't have to worry about everything else. The net effect over millions of such people and decisions is that the total information in the economy is processed more optimally. That doesn't mean that lots of people don't make bad decisions (they do). It's just that more people are able to hold enough information in their heads to make small decisions, than they are for large decisions.
Smarter people, though, can make larger decisions more accurately, which is probably why there's a such a strong correlation between IQ and income.
However, individuals are less likely to make good decisions over a broad range of fields, because they don't have enough information to do so. That's where the run-of-the-mill stock analyst resides -- he doesn't really know about the business behind a stock, he just knows the transaction side of the business, and perhaps some of the short-term business aspects, but as a generalist across many, many businesses he doesn't have much more in the way real insights on the performance of individual stocks than your average person.
Moreover, there is a certain randomness to the stock business, because there is a strong element of randomness in other peoples' investment decisions. For some reason the idea of market fluctuations reminds me of how passengers' heads all move the same way when an airliner hits turbulence. Nobody's immune to the short-term random fluctuations -- it's more a question of what happens over the course of time.
The problem with the premise of this article is that it assumes that there is no way to gain that expertise. However, there are investment companies that historically do very well -- precisely because they can afford to hire people to understand small sectors of the investment world. Those companies are just as subject to random market fluctuations as anybody else, but over the long term, they've shown the ability to pick investments that can ride through the fluctuations.
It seems to me that there's little more to this article than the seed of a sound business strategy (which has already been discovered many times).
No doubt true, and I don't know whether or not the examples he cites can stand up to that kind of scrutiny. I've really just started the book.
But it is a perspective I never expected I'd find myself agreeing with. I, like everyone else here I imagine, have always been skeptical of the prevailing attitudes. I'm one who tends to feel reassured whenever I find myself holding the minority view -- the rugged individualism ethos. I'm sure I learned from my old man. (My cousin once said "well, your dad would argue with a stump.") And I still think it is what makes this society tick.
This author presents his ideas much better than I can here, and though I can't square all of them with what I now hold, I don't think they necessarily contradict them either. And, he ratifies what we sometimes forget is at the core of our beliefs: about representative government, free markets, equality under law, and trial by juries, etc. One thing is true; people are likely know less than they think they know. That's seems like good medicine and worth the price. I think the book is worth a read.