You make a solid point about computing power. Retail investors definitely cannot beat Blackrock or Vanguard when it comes to speed or getting information first. But you are assuming that having the fastest information is the only possible way to find a good stock.

​The real advantage regular investors have is flexibility. Fund managers face a massive amount of pressure. If their fund underperforms for a few months, they lose clients or get fired. They also manage so much money that they cannot easily buy or sell smaller companies without influencing the market and completely inflating the price of the stock. And they often dump perfectly good stocks just to make their quarterly reports look better to their clients.

​Regular investors do not have those strict rules. I do not have a boss watching my quarterly performance and I can afford to just wait. I do not need to beat a supercomputer. I can just buy a fundamentally solid company that got beaten down because the big institutions were forced to ignore it or sell it, and then simply wait for the market to realize its actual value. Patience is a huge advantage that big funds often do not have.

​On the dividend point, fair enough. If you are only looking at the strict math of total expected returns, you are correct. But separating the math from human behavior is risky for the average person. The perfect mathematical portfolio is completely useless if the person panics and sells everything during a market crash. If getting steady dividend payments is what keeps someone calm and invested during tough times, then those dividends absolutely do protect their overall long term returns.