Example: Buffett made the bet in December 2007, arguing that a fund holding the same stocks as found in the Standard & Poor's 500 index could beat the combined performance of a group of hedge funds over the following 10 years. Buffet won easily - https://www.usatoday.com/story/money/markets/2018/03/07/warr...
Real Life Meaning - You need to diversify so much that you just bet on America's economy and not on intelligence of a manager.
The real benefit to passive, indexed investments is not just lower fees, but the ability to hold onto your portfolio without losing sleep. Loosely paraphrased from Bill Bernstein: If your active fund has a bad year or five, you don't know whether it's the fund manager's incompetence or just a rough market. In a passive, indexed fund, you can be sure that it's not the fault of an incompetent manager, thus letting you feel secure in holding onto your investments through thick and thin. Churning your portfolio and paying capital gains tax all along the way is a recipe for underperforming the market.
Not true. This has been studied and disproven[1] many many times. The only people who keep saying that are either just too stubborn, disinformed or just lying because they have a vested interest.
[1]: just one article (there's a lot of research out there) https://www.barrons.com/articles/monkeys-are-better-stockpic...
However, that thought experiment doesn't make individual stock pickers and active fund managers better (skilled) investors in any way.
If you don't have confidence in America, you could diversify by holding a portion of money in indexed international funds. But be careful, no one can predict the future! Best to hold a little bit of everything.
Compare this to, e.g. Europe.
Not so certain these days.
Better examples aren't as easy to come by as cynics think. I think the problem they see is that it's worse than it was ten years ago, rather than that it's worse than most other places.
Most retail investors make the mistake of assuming high growth = it will be a profitable investment. In fact, the companies and countries that are talked about in the press as being "the fastest growing" are typically the worst investments. How is this possible?
Because everybody else has also purchased that investment thinking the same thing you are and pushed its valuation beyond even high growth levels.
The simple fact is that the American economy, and especially American financial instruments absolutely dominate the Global Economy. Consequently, a long term negative growth in the US would, by definition, lead to a Global Economic Downturn.
This is just BS. There might not be other easy/convenient options for people in the US to invest in other economies, but that surely doesn't mean there aren't any options.
One option: gold.
Sure, you can criticize gold as an investment all you want (and I'm not recommending it), but it's definitely an alternative to investing (directly) in the US economy.
I would certainly run the numbers if they didn't say they don't want me as a client.
I'm not saying there's no value for gold at all, I'm saying that it's not an investment in the typical sense. Hold a small percentage of gold as a low-ish correlating asset class to rebalance with? Sounds great. Hold maybe 3-5% of assets in physical gold as a hyper-hedge insurance policy in case the US or world at large collapses? Perhaps a smart move. Holding all one's assets in gold as a perceived investment? No thanks!