And most people will never fully understand that until it happens to them. Then you have this eye opening moment, and you understand.
Nothing lasts forever. Conditions change in every arena of competition, not just the market. If a professional basketball player is incredibly successful until their bodies literally begin to degrade, do we raise philosophical questions about the inherent attribution of their skill?
People don't seem to respond well to the quant fund examples, so how about this - how has Warren Buffett consistently beat the market through Berkshire Hathaway? If he ceased beating the market this year, would it because he has been lucky all these years? Would it be because the market conditions that supported his success have fundamentally changed? If so, why does that indicate his performance was due to chance?
People were asking this back during the dotcom boom, when he lagged the market by a huge percentage.
Gotta wonder how many Warrens were unlucky enough to have this happen early on in their careers.
I recall reading a stock book back in the 1980s that claimed that Buffet's legendary status at the time was entirely due to his purchase of Geico
I'd even let you change your list Jan. 1st of each year as long as we agree that any hedge fund found to be a fraud of some kind counts as a zero in your sum.
This is actually a pretty good bet for you given how poorly one would expect stocks to perform over the next 10 years