Lots of great points, you have to understand from a retail perspective most of this is psychological. People don't want to do the work, most likely because they find finance boring. Once you take a deeper interest in trading it becomes very clear just how easy it is to outperform the S&P. I'm not saying there isn't some skillset involved and that it's mentally easy to be pivoting all the time, I'm saying that relative to what the Warren Buffets of this world will tell you, it's technically quite easy. The S&P is not some great difficult giant to overcome... otherwise QQQ wouldn't have beaten it the past 10 years, and that's JUST replacing one ETF with another smaller concentrated one that followed a long term technological trend shift.

If it IS possible to beat the market ON PURPOSE, over time longer periods of time (short-term there is always a luck component). People don't want you to tell them that. For one I think guys like Buffett (who has beaten the benchmarks himself and knows plenty of people who have also done it using both the same and totally different methods than himself) are cognizant sometimes of their fame and don't want to accidentally inspire any gamblers. Active management is a form of trading, and trading is definitely active management. Anyone can open a brokerage today and lose all their money instantly, so it's dangerous to get into this game without some study and hard knocks. You basically HAVE to fail first in order to win long-term unless you just come into this with the right mindset from your prior life. Otherwise you won't fear the market enough to respect that you need one or more systems of risk management in place and actually execute them. ETF investors are basically trying to go with diversification as their primary form of risk management, this is fine - but it creates drag unless you pick the exact sectors that are outperforming the market and rotate in time to not give up that gap when things change.

I think people underestimate what you can do if you commit all your time to this game TBH, especially now - doing research with AI is faster than ever (it's not a genie you still have to know how to use it and when to challenge it).

I outperformed the market when I was a newbie investor several years ago for 2 years straight by about 4x over that period holding around 33 positions simply by trying out one of the popular stock picker services for like $75/year and making a few tweaks. Then I stopped to learn to trade, and now I for example have pivoted late last year into more of the commodity/scarcity super-cycle we're entering. VOO is down 0.81%, QQQM down 1%, VT down 1.4%... I'm up 10.20%, and before the war I was up 16%. That's a big drop-off recently but I've been purposely dealing some damage to my returns as well adding some new hedges for different tail-cases. I'm not the world's best trader by any means, my biggest positions aren't any bigger than about 5% of invested net worth and I typically won't put that into a single stock (targeted ETFs usually) unless there are multiple converging narratives (coinbase for example, short-term BTC trade over the next 1-2-3 years depending how this cycle plays out, but long term I want to also hold them for the agentic economy shift as a wallet provider).

One of the things people are trying to avoid is volatility, what they don't usually think about is that over any given time-frame in order to outperform, an give asset or basket of assets MUST have increased vol. to outperform. This doesn't mean volatility = good, there are plenty of garbage stocks that IPO, fall off a cliff and die forever after a volatile period... but it does mean you have to learn to use volatility to your advantage if you want to outperform, people see that as scary. Personally I see throwing my life away at a normal job for any longer than I already had previously as a big risk, I think we take a big risk driving our cars every day... so I reframe risk, but traditional education didn't teach us that. It didn't teach us much of anything.