[rockrock]

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I believe the market to be effecient for the individual investor. He is up against too much information, too many eyeballs and too much money to win.

He is virtually guaranteed to fail against the indexes.

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I'm an invidual investor. I've never had a losing year, never trailed the indexes, in fact on average I'm beating indexes by over 30% a year. Warren Buffett himself has promised that if he only had to manage $1M, he would guarantee 50% annual returns.

You don't understand how much inefficiency is in the small cap and micro-cap arena. A disciplined value investor can achieve some amazing returns with a small portfolio.

I'm not saying it's easy. It's nearly a full time job for me, and my advice to other investors is typically the same as yours, buy index funds. But I just hate your use of the words "virtually guaranteed to fail", when there are thousands of investors like me beating the market intelligently with low risk, using nothing more than Ben Graham's and Warren Buffett's guidance and teachings.

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Beating what market? What index???

The truth of the matter is that someone is always going to be beating their benchmark. A good example of this is top performing mutual fund listings. The top performing mutual funds in their respective categories is never an index fund but its virtually never the same fund year after year.