I can't figure out why anyone invests in active management, so asking me about hedge funds is just an extreme version of the same question. Since I think everything is appropriately priced, my advice would be to avoid high fees. So you can forget about hedge funds.

I can't figure out why anyone invests in active management, so asking me about hedge funds is just an extreme version of the same question. Since I think everything is appropriately priced, my advice would be to avoid high fees. So you can forget about hedge funds.

I take the market-efficiency hypothesis to be the simple statement that security prices fully reflect all available information.

Active management is a zero-sum game before cost, and the winners have to win at the expense of the losers.

People would be a lot more skeptical if they understood that there is an incredible amount of chance in the results that you observe for active managers. So the distribution of outcomes is enormously wide - but that's exactly what you'd expect by chance with lots of active managers who hold imperfectly diversified portfolios. The really good portfolios contain a lot of really lucky picks, and the really bad portfolios contain a lot of really unlucky picks as well as some really bad ones.

The distribution of the market is fat-tailed relative to the normal distribution... For passive investors, none of this matters, beyond being aware that outlier returns are more common than would be expected if return distributions were normal.

I’d compare stock pickers to astrologers but I don’t want to bad mouth astrologers.