I’ll repeat, I never made a claim that any percentage other than outliers beat the market. Let me restate my point succinctly for you: I consider it dogmatic to frame the conversation as the grandparent comment did, which is saying, “Don’t even try, you’ll lose.” That is dogmatic, which is dentrimental to financial education in general - the reasoning of facts is as important for independent learning as the facts themselves. I provided nuance in the discussion by explaining how it’s possible to beat the market, without ever disagreeing that the best course of action is to simply invest passively. I’ve actually reiterated several times now that most investors should just invest in index funds.

I’m not sure what in particular you’re arguing against, because it doesn’t appear to be relevant to my central point as I’ve explained it in this thread. You act as though I’m saying that it’s easy to beat the market, when my entire thesis here has been that it’s not correct to declare people will fail out of hand. If anything, I think I’ve taken rather extreme pains to tediously and explicitly point out the caveats so as not to be disingenuous in my points.

In fact, I literally made a comparison to professional athletics in my first comment, which is (statistically) a lottery. If that isn’t enough, what more do you want? More pertinently, I am focused more on complete education that allows people to be self-sufficient: would you advocate saying to kids, “Don’t even bother trying to go pro, you’ll fail.”, or would you advocate explaining to them the honest chances, encouraging them to have fallback plans for their careers, and then providing them with the best chance they can have for what they already want to do? People respond far more favorably to neutral, complete presentations of facts than they do to imperative statements that don’t provide a clear context for their justification.