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Comment by michaelt | Hacker News Reader

God forbid we participants in the stock market evaluate a business before investing in it, or do any sort of work to get the return we're promised.

I, for one, much prefer to earn a 9% return without expending any effort or thought at all.

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For most people their talent and expertise does not involve investing. That's why pensions and 401ks exist and why S&P/nasdaq have rules to protect the public.

You may wish it were not so, you may find it inelegant and infuriating and unfair, but it is a fact that retail investors nearly all underperform the market over a long enough time horizon. Maybe you are built different but for most of us it is very rational to take the market return for “free”.

Do understand, though, that market return will struggle to achieve 9% for the coming decades. A 9% annualised return would put the US stock market at 50% of world GDP in 10 years (edit: 20) and something like 90% of world GDP in 30 years (edit: 50 years). Cost of goods, and your customer's money, both have to come out of global GDP too.

(The current value of around 25% of global GDP doesn't even include the 1.75 trillion SpaceX which alone would be another almost 1%...)

ETF expense ratios are small but still mean retail will underperform anyway. It's an unfortunate situation all around.

Yeah I am not taking a position on how the market will do in the future. Just saying that active investing will underperform passive unless you are one of the few market participants who actually has alpha.

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