Chipotle's stock dropped 10% and Starbucks's rose 25% when the CEO switched from one to the other this past week. If this guy is just a meritless lottery winner, then you can make a lot of money betting against the market and the extremely large group of heavily motivated and intelligent investors who think otherwise.
Ah yes, the "if you're truly right clearly you would be rich using that information to trade" argument. Would you be willing to consider that the market is not always smart or a good measure of how we should value things?
Would you be willing to consider that some half baked theory about why CEOs are the manifestation of luck is actually just an unhealthy way of coping with failures?
So, bad CEOs are bad? What a revelation. We're not isolating this analysis to bad ones (who generally don't last very long). We're talking about a blanket, overarching, ill-informed and bitter "analysis" that contends CEOs are meritless lottery winners.
Have you ever seen any process of filtering job candidates that doesn't have massive failures? Look no further than sports. There is no profession with more accessible information about candidate qualifications, and we still see significant failures, signing people to hundreds of millions of dollars who never produce any value over a replacement player. Does that mean the process is no better than throwing darts at phone book? No. There are still actual skills that are hard to attain, and are decent predictors of performance.
When it comes to CEOs, despite the fact that this process doesn't value YOUR skills very highly doesn't mean it's purely random. It means you've either chosen to ignore this filtering process, you never learned what the process is, or you aren't good enough to stand out within it. But that doesn't mean it's a zero-signal filtration.
