1) if you are a fund you just cant' sit out 3 years. Your fund will shut down as everyone will yank their money,. if its your own money then people will leave as you won't pay bonuses.
2) If you went short in 2006 then you wouldn't have survived until teh crash of late 2008.
> It's pretty easy to make way above average returns on the stock market.
This is just an absurd statement along the lines of its easy to build a billion dollar company just mimic what all the other billion dollar companies do.
Sorry for being so negative to your comment, but come on. That statement can't be seriously defended in any resonable manner.
Do you want to spend time finding the right investors or do you want to spend time reading 10Ks?
The fact that funds do worse than indexed etfs says more about fund incentives and investor savviness than it does about the effectiveness of this strategy.