FAANG

FAANG anchors Chris Paik’s “right AND clever” caution against reflexive Contrarianism. Paik’s point: many public investors avoided FAANG despite it driving the majority of market returns, because owning it felt “too obvious” — “they wanted to be right AND clever.” Kyle marshals this in his Conviction-Led Contrarianism thinking to argue that conviction won’t always land on a contrarian position; sometimes it lands on a widely held belief that simply happens to be true, and you shouldn’t reject an idea just because it’s obvious.

Context: FAANG is an acronym (popularized by CNBC’s Jim Cramer) for a group of large, high-performing U.S. technology stocks — Facebook (Meta), Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and Google (Alphabet) — that drove an outsized share of public-market returns through the 2010s.

Where this appears

• Chris Paik — FAANG as the example behind his “right AND clever” critique: investors avoided the obvious winner that drove most market returns.