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.

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

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.

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

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