[dangus]

I totally get what you’re saying.

I’ll make an analogy to maybe help explain what I mean further:

I own a somewhat diverse set of 50 company stocks, at least for the purposes of this exercise.

Let’s say a bunch of those companies merge, now there’s only 20 companies.

No product lines have been discontinued. The companies make all the same things with the same client lists.

Did my investments become less diverse when these companies merged? Perhaps in some ways yes, in many other ways no.

Is my investment portfolio more diverse if I own one stock, Apple, or if I own three stocks, Time Warner, Paramount, and Comcast? All these companies make media content, but Apple is in more industry verticals overall in addition to being a media company (or at least, we can say they are for the purposes of this analogy). If the content industry collapses, Apple is fine, the rest not so much.

[keernan]

Size and success is not a diversification factor. Investment history is scattered with the bones of 'golden child' companies that never saw the death train coming at them through the tunnel. Intel. Nokia. Blockbuster. Yahoo.

Moreover, your examples are crossing over into active investing versus indexing. Indexing theory submits active investors cannot beat indexing over time (Buffet's purchasing/controlling whole companies notwithstanding).

[dangus]

I'm not talking about size and success, I'm talking about participation in a diverse array of industry verticals.

My example is not meant to specifically talk about active investing, I'm just picking out companies to discuss within a hypothetical index holding.

> Intel. Nokia. Blockbuster. Yahoo.

Interesting, 3/4 of these still exist and are doing reasonably well. If you bought their stocks 30 years ago you'd be up on your investment on all of them except for Blockbuster. Obviously, they're not top performers in that timespan (although Nokia ADR pays dividends like other telecoms so maybe it is a good investment in the right index).

You have inadvertently demonstrated some of my point here: companies that serve diverse verticals stick around for decades. For example, Nokia’s consumer business evaporated but their telecom business is still here. See also: BlackBerry.