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

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

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

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.'

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.