"Average" is a bit misleading word when it comes to the market.

If you're a top investing expert, you do things carefully in the right way, and you don't make mistakes, you can expect average performance. Because the market primarily consists of experts like you.

Of course, investing is a random process, and you often beat the market by being lucky. But luck doesn't last indefinitely.

There are basically two ways to beat the market consistently. One is trading based on information not available to the rest of the market. This is sometimes banned, because it makes the market less fair and less efficient. It can also be a crime. The other is finding a market that's small enough or obscure enough that it's not interesting to the professionals.

But there is no investing stat that allows you to beat the market. Life is not an RPG.

You’re missing the word ”expect” in the original claim.

You can beat the house at blackjack, but you can’t reliably expect to do it.

Investment is hardly a zero sum game. If it were nobody would make anything buy investing passively either. So how is that a reasonable analogy?

> you can’t reliably expect to do it.

Sure, I can't. But assuming that it's not entirely random chance some proportion of people certainly can.

> Investment is hardly a zero sum game. If it were nobody would make anything buy investing passively either. So how is that a reasonable analogy?

I think you’re reading too much into the analogy, which is maybe my fault for using an analogy. The point was just that it’s not that you can’t win, just that you very likely don’t have an edge - not because it’s mathematically impossible like in blackjack with a shoe that’s continuously shuffled, but because it’s so difficult.

> Sure, I can't. But assuming that it's not entirely random chance some proportion of people certainly can.

Yes, but the bar is very high.