It's quite puzzling to see people say that no one can make...

It's quite puzzling to see people say that no one can make predictions. Obviously no one can do it with 100% accuracy, but if you think it is impossible for a human to have any ability to predict future share prices it makes absolutely no sense to have anything to do with the stock market unless you're just using it as a casino.

I can very, very easily find small, crappy companies which I can reliably predict will go down in price. A sufficiently good analyst can predict with reasonable accuracy where various companies are headed. We all try to do this and if we're good enough we can make money on average because our predictive ability is better than random selection. If you believe no one let alone yourself has any predictive ability, why would you put your money down?