The key is that for every Apple, there are a ton of companies we don’t even remember the names of that went out of business or otherwise did not beat the SP500.
Put another way - if you can reliably pick the next Apple before anyone else, you should go work in finance and make tons of money.
> Put another way - if you can reliably pick the next Apple before anyone else
Problem is that it might take years to verify that.
> The key is that
That doesn't change the fact that there are plenty (in absolute numbers) of individual investors who consistently beat the market. Whether that's because of luck or something else is rather hard to tell.
> That doesn't change the fact that there are plenty (in absolute numbers) of individual investors who consistently beat the market. Whether that's because of luck or something else is rather hard to tell.
It's actually not very hard to tell; if it was because of something other than luck, you'd expect that beating the market in the past would have some predictive value of their ability to beat the market in the future.
Put another way - if you can reliably pick the next Apple before anyone else, you should go work in finance and make tons of money.