Wouldn't it be possible to do worse? I think there should be enough opportunities to pick up true losers or almost dying companies.
I'm not saying you could extract profit for those situation as there are too many other people trying to do it. But losing money should certainly be possible.
1. You could try to do worse than average, and you'd succeed, but only because of the skewness of individual stock performance. You'd be no better than random chance at picking losers, it'd just be that most stocks are losers.
2. Factor-correction means the strategy of "choosing dying companies" won't work (e.g. in the Fama and French five factor model a dying company would an outlier in terms of high-minus-low, robust-minus-weak, and probably conservative-minus-aggressive).
I'm not saying you could extract profit for those situation as there are too many other people trying to do it. But losing money should certainly be possible.