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

I don't even know what that means. People who get credit have to get it from somewhere. Does a credit bubble mean that people save too much during that period? I don't know what a credit bubble means. I don't even know what a bubble means. These words have become popular. I don't think they have any meaning.

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.

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

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.

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