Hi Nicolas,
Thank you for your comment. Yes, craftsmanship alpha is correct. But extraordinary craftsmanship or skill is the essential base for every alpha, which you cannot get from the market without. If the outcome can be explained by factors, that is fine and interesting, but does not change the individual alpha performance of Buffett or other extraordinary investor, e.g. quant investor Dunn, who actually surpassed Buffett's Alpha persistently for decades already:
https://www.markettamer.com/blog/who-is-the-greatest-investor

Thus, even though I am not a particular fan of Buffett, but learned a lot from his basic principles for my own predominantly quant pure alpha/beta investment style, I still cannot understand, why you suggest "a lack of alpha"? Didn't you impressively demonstrate his high alpha skills by analyzing ex post his really smart dynamic ex ante factor selection skill based on real track record results?

This can never be compared with these pure marketing gags of so called smart beta funds, offered mainly for charging increased fees in order to compensate the shrinking profits from active mutual equity funds!? Why are they also rightly so called "dumb alpha", in the first place? Is there any smart beta fund with a real track record with a high alpha performance similar to value investor Buffet or quant investor Dunn? I don't know any. But if Buffet had a "lack of alpha", mimicking his style and success should not have been such a rare thing, if everybody can pick it up for sure in the ETF offer.

Certainly, Winton makes a case for factor investing, but certainly NOT for so-called Smart Beta/dumb alpha by moving away from trend following towards risk premia strategies, BUT by adapting and optimizing the allocation of all essential investment factors, such as trend, value, momentum..., in the only sensible active way in order to keep producing extraordinary alpha, favorably uncorrelated to broad market beta, in structurally changing market times.

I am not at all apposed to factor investing, if it is done in the right active way as Buffett, Dunn and Winton are doing this, but against the tale of superior passive factor investing, serving for less honorable goals and misguiding more bounded rational investors.

That is what infuriates Harding as well, when he writes in his view, referring to Fama's flawed later work, dis-improving his great research results in the beginning with valuable simple formulations of the EMH: " “Seeing your hypothesis falsified and then trying to defend it by retrospectively introducing extra variables and fitting the data to them is hardly the height of good scientific practice.”
(https://www.winton.com/davids-views/July-2018/wintons-david-harding-on-…)