I'd happily do a total-return swap of the S&P 500 against any basket of VC and PE funds you'd care to name that are currently accepting new investments. Assuming, of course, that there's some reasonable way of collateralizing and settling things at the scale I'm willing to risk ($10k notional), which I honestly doubt.
If beating the market was that easy, then everyone would do it. So either the top tier funds become closed to new investment after becoming top tier, or they stop over-performing for idiosyncratic reasons, or something. I'm using outside view logic here, I really don't care at all for the stories they tell. It's honestly downright dangerous to pay too much attention to the marketing material of investment funds - after all, Bernie Madoff consistently showed 11% annual gains. At the end of the day, the average investment must achieve average returns.
It's not easy. You need $100m+ of capital and a long time horizon to implement it. Very, very few people have that. It's less than 0.0004% of the population.
You do. That's the whole point. If you invest in a basket of top tier VC and PE funds, they will destroy indexes over the next 10 years. Yale is a great example of this; over the last 20 years their average returns are 12% which is 50% more than what an index did (7-8%):
https://www.institutionalinvestor.com/article/b17qpx3nyyqywd...