Entertaining but not very useful discussion. In "A Conversation with NYU Professor Aswath Damodaran" he says it all much simpler with common sense from behavioral finance:

- "The biggest factor in pricing is what other people are doing."
- "The pricing process is all about mood and momentum. [...] it is the biggest explanatory variable for why price is moving."
- "Value players are far more dependent on momentum than they realize, because ultimately, for them to make money, the price has to move to its value."
https://elmwealth.com/aswath-damodaran-interview/

However, the momentum anomaly should not be participated in by cross-sectional, as only focused here. But better by time-series-momentum or trend following. Because a cross-sectional momentum crash, as in 2008, would have been transformed into contrarian crisis alpha melt-up through time-series-momentum. It rather protects equity market investments instead of drawing them down even deeper.

Thus, pure indexing and trend following without value is a combination of the main forces, driving investment results. Because they are based on the proper two dominating first principles. On the one hand side on the Efficient Market Hypothesis in the efficient market regime of the random walk. On the other hand side on Behavioral Finance in the inefficient regime of boom and bust. Fundamentals are then simply replaced by anomalies.

Thus, this combination is to be preferred for long-term investments. Particularly when bonds turn positively correlated to stocks in times of high inflation, coming up now. The co-creator of the Capital Asset Pricing Model (CAPM), John Lintner, pointed this out already about 40 years ago in his ground-breaking "Lintner Paper" on "The Potential Role of Managed Commodity-Financial Futures Accounts (and/or Funds) in Portfolios of Stocks and Bonds":

"The combined portfolios of stocks (or stocks and bonds) after including judicious investments in appropriately selected sub-portfolios of investments in managed futures accounts (or funds) show substantially less risk at every possible level of expected return than portfolios of stock (or stocks and bonds) alone."

I wonder, why this well-known approach was not even mentioned with one word by these presumed top thinkers of finance. According to general knowledge in Wikipedia it is considered "a foundational milestone [...] to advance this investment discipline".