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.'

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.

The efficient market theory is one of the better models in the sense that it can be taken as true for every purpose I can think of. For investment purposes, there are very few investors that shouldn't behave as if markets are totally efficient.

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?

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

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

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.'