Vanguard themselves have changed things so that employees no longer have the option of choosing the S&P 500 fund in their own retirement accounts, but rather the Total Market fund:
An individual's best bet, long term: buy as much of 'The Market' as you can. The greater, the better. The S&P 500 is simply a smaller portion of the market, and while not bad, may not be ideal:
>Anyone investing in equities is just in it for the ride, as it is impossible to predict what will happen
So people like Jim Simons are merely the luckiest people alive?
The average person earns the average market return, less fees; that's a tautology. Unless you have some reason to believe you aren't average, most people are better off following your advice. It's what I do, personally.
But the idea that no one is winning at this game flies in the face of a lot of evidence.
> So people like Jim Simons are merely the luckiest people alive?
No one reasonable, not even Fama and French who came up with the Efficient Market Hypothesis, claim that the market is 100% efficient.
And given that no one knows anything about Jim Simon's Medallion Fund, we actually have no idea how successful they are. But given the quantities and/or trading volumes possibly involved, they don't have to be right very often.
In a perfectly efficient market, it's 50/50 whether you'll get the better end of the deal. Now think of a casino: for many games the house's edge is only 1.5% (e.g. blackjack, baccarat, three-card poker).
There's always someone out of approx. 1 million who will flip a coin heads 20 times in a row. The guy who does is always the poster boy for active management. You can (of course only after the fact) interview him, ask him how he thinks he became such a good coin flipper, and read investment books about him, or just passively invest and accept market returns.
There are index funds of every publicly traded company in the US:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_3000_Index
Vanguard themselves have changed things so that employees no longer have the option of choosing the S&P 500 fund in their own retirement accounts, but rather the Total Market fund:
* https://www.marketwatch.com/story/vanguard-thinks-its-own-em...
* https://www.marketwatch.com/story/bogle-explains-why-vanguar...
> You don't have much of a choice if you're a Boglehead who bought into the S&P 500, you're just in it for the ride.
Anyone investing in equities is just in it for the ride, as it is impossible to predict what will happen:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Random_Walk_Down_Wall_Street
An individual's best bet, long term: buy as much of 'The Market' as you can. The greater, the better. The S&P 500 is simply a smaller portion of the market, and while not bad, may not be ideal:
* https://www.pwlcapital.com/should-you-invest-in-the-sp-500-i...