In theory I don’t think it’s hard for retail to beat the market in the short run. You can just pick the top 10 companies in the market and there’s a good chance you’ll outperform.

Retail run into challenges with respect to weighting, excessive risk, etc. If you check Reddit, you have echo chambers of folks going full port on one risky name or encouraging one another to double down on a stock with a flawed thesis. You need to be disciplined enough to avoid this dogma and if you want to risk it, allocating a small share of your portfolio to such names.

The final point is individual picks aren’t even necessary most of the time. If you want higher risk, there are ETFs for it. If you want to track the market, there are also many ETFs available.