First of all, telling someone that you can’t beat the market is like telling a six year old that Santa Claus doesn’t exist. We all want to try to do this. Look, I index most of my investments but investing is fun and I buy some individual stocks. The second reason and the more fundamental one is that, in fact, people make money selling you actively managed funds. The average actively managed fund has an expense ratio of plus to 1 percentage point a year, it’s a darn good business and that’s why you have it. And so, Wall Street in some sense wants to ensure that you tell people “this is too complicated, you can’t do it yourself”. The fact of the matter is you can do it yourself, do it very easily. And that’s one of the reasons why I wrote the book, I think you can do it yourself, you want to have some fun buying some individual stocks, go ahead, do it. But you can do it then with much less risk if the core of your portfolio is in low expense, very broadly based index funds.
