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

In an efficient market at any point in time the actual price of a security will be a good estimate of its intrinsic value.

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

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.

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

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.'

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.