The average index fund fails to outperform the S&P.
How many passive index funds are there worldwide? Thousands? How many beat VTI or S&P500? Answer: QQQ and small cap.
> Of those how much can be attributed statistically to skill rather than luck?
If you are picking S&P as your champion, then I am allowed to pick a hedge fund as my champion.
And Citadel outperforms S&P over 20+ year horizon. Citadel 19% vs S&P 10%.
This is a straw man as most people understand investing in indexes as buying a an index that tracks the s&p.
>If you are picking S&P as your champion, then I am allowed to pick a hedge fund as my champion.
You are making a false equivalence. The s&p is a proxy for the us market and therefore is a benchmark. It captures the captures the bets placed by all market participants including citadel.
Citadel does something beyond buying and selling equities to generate that alpha. And it’s likely not just restricted to equities. Nonetheless they are an outlier. Which is the point I was making. Most people won’t do better than the us market in aggregate over a similar stretch of time.