After taking risk into account, do more managers than you’d see by chance outperform with persistence? Virtually every economist who studied this question answers with a resounding 'no.'

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.

An investor doesn’t have a prayer of picking a manager that can deliver true alpha.

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.

Markets are efficient, but there are different dimensions of risk and those lead to different dimensions of expected returns. That's what people should be concerned with in their investment decisions and not with whether they can pick stocks, pick winners and losers among the various managers delivering basically the same product.

I don't think the Federal Reserve has any role in how high rates are right now. I don't understand why everyone is paying attention to this tapering. The Fed is using one kind of bond to buy another kind of bond. What's the big deal, and why is anyone taking the Fed seriously?