Simply "buy and hold" does NOT accurately summarize the totality of Buffett's strategy [...]
Sorry if i made the impression that i wanted to say this, it is however not the case if you read carefuly. I did not say what you understood. I used the "B&H"-strategy example just because my impression is that the majority in this community follows this strategy overall. It was not my intention to link that to buffet as i know he did far more than B&H.
The choosen particular strategy does not matter for what i tried to lay out above.
My claim is, that a strategy (even an indefinitely complex one) must always be choosen and adapted with data from the past and present, yet it points to a not-yet-known possible future. With a given strategy you try to exploit a particular future that will emerge without knowing how it will turn out when choosing your strategy. If you do this well, you try to strenghten your strategy to succeed in as many possible-futures as possible which does increase your overall success rate. But the success rate can only be determined afterwards (when the future becomes the past and one particular future of all those many-many-many possible ones becomes reality).
Since you are posting on this forum, why don't you apply the same logic to MMM? He was just some guy who got lucky, right?
I apply this logic to him too, as well as me and it holds true so far. Everything MMM did was in perspective to an unknown future. If the russians would pose nuclear WWIII upon us and the world comes to an end even MMMs life would change drastically, possibly to a point in which we would not see it as success.
Take me for example: I prepare my life- financial strategy to be able to bear a wide range of possible "futures". Yet i do not know which one will become reality. My success rate (meaning retirement before 60) has a high probability of success - but there are possible futures where i will never be able to retire (the one where i get divorced in two years and loose my job and never get another one, for example).
I depend on the overall world conditions (which i think will be awesome, btw) for my life to turn out good, like everyone else. Also Buffet would have not been able to become what he is now if markets werent in his favor. The particular market that we have seen the last 100 years where purely luck. BTW by "luck" i mean not "gamble in the casino". It is a question of probability that you can find everywhere where systems (even deterministic ones) are complex and unpredictable.
Imagine the one fictional history where Buffet invested in silver "because it made sense" but against all odds he lose the bet and also some other assets crashed badly. Would you say, he was 100% sure that what he did was riskless? Certainly no, because if that would have been the case, we would have a magnitude more Buffets by now (or more likely the deal would not yield very much).
It was Buffets "luck" that none of his major risks (he was not able to cover) ever turned out to bite him in the back. This was luck and not buffets skill. His skill maybe lies in the fact that he maximized his success rate quite good.
If i think about it, i think we have a different definiton of "luck" and its outcomes.