The market is not efficient. Full stop. Stop telling me that I'm not going to beat the market. I beat the market all the time. In 2007 I was telling everyone I know that the housing market was about to burst. I sold all of my family investing company's stocks (except for Apple) and I moved everything into money markets / bank accounts. Bought back in during 2009, road the wave up until about last year I started feeling a bit skiddish and sold off not everything, but many things. I routinely pick individual stocks, like Apple, Telsa, Amazon, Bitcoin; that I know are better. Apple: iPhone is better. I don't care if some analyst at Goldman knew this before me 90% of the public was still talking about how Blackberry had a keyboard. Telsa: the physics made sense, plus Elon had that Silicon Valley-ness to him. Amazon I knew would win with AWS and the whole "ecommerce is a bear" thing. Bitcoin: People like drugs and buying things online, bought in at $4 a coin, have since sold almost all of it.
It is actually really easy if you are smart enough to be a programmer to beat the market. Just make sure you understand the domain you are in really well, and be cautious of overall trends in the economy. I've averaged 18% year over year returns with a diversified portfolio (yes, more than a quarter of that is bonds or and another quarter is super low risk dividend companies like consumer staples).
"Survivorship bias" I hear you say.
Maybe there should be this other word "suvivorship bias bias" where one is incapable of having their view of the efficient market hypothesis challenged because this is the only thing that comes to mind when they talk to someone about investing.
There are ways to do better than the S&P 500. Patrick is right about one thing though, you won't pick winning stocks from reading the newspaper but you might miss a 2008/2009 if you read The Economist instead of Time Magazine.
http://www.tradersnarrative.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/03/a...
http://img.timeinc.net/time/images/covers/pacific/2005/20050...