Wall Street, as well as numerous other financial institutions, spend enormous amounts of money trying to persuade the investing public that their products and/or expertise can beat the market. Makes sense if they make money whenever you, the public, buy, trade or sell something. My extensive reading of academic investing articles has convinced me that the sanest way to invest (as opposed to gamble) is to construct portfolios using index mutual funds or exchange traded funds (ETFs) that try and capture the best risk/reward profile for a given client's risk tolerance and time horizon. Research has shown convincingly that frequent trading by an investor leads to under-performance in the long run. The main idea behind index investing is over the long term an investor can expect to receive the market return for a given asset class minus the expenses paid. To beat the asset class performance over time means the investor has access to something the market as a whole does not..usually information. The only information that is not public in the information age is inside information.