I think it’s more like Buffet would say you should either choose the optimal passive investment strategy (index funds), or be a fully active investor yourself (picking your own investment strategy), rather than paying significant fees for someone else (hedge funds) to actively invest for you.

A close relative that's a professional analyst told me: if you have some unique insight on some specific market, use it on the market! (as long as it is actionable into investment choices) You can likely beat the market and experienced analysts, which often don't have that much technical expertise or outstanding insight (instead relying on economic and financial analysis). The few times I did... it worked.

> ...if you have some unique insight on some specific market, use it on the market!

One thing to be cautious of here is that people often overinvest when they have some sort of advantage, and become way too over-leveraged in one single area.

I remember a calculation from a college finance class. Imagine you have an otherwise "optimal" portfolio with 1% of its assets in a particular large stock, but you know that the real average returns of that stock are going to be ~2x what the market is expecting. So you recompute the efficient portfolio with this new information and find the new optimal weight of the stock and it's only something like 2-3% despite having a very strong information advantage over the market.

But most people would think this sounds crazy. "I've got a crazy inside stock tip that it's worth double what everyone else thinks? Shouldn't I put at least 10% of my money in there?" No. Diversity is a hell of a value-add in a portfolio.

Hedge funds won’t necessarily have technical experts in every field as employees making investment decisions, but they are paying those people for research. So “more knowledgeable than the average trader” doesn’t mean that you know more than the market is pricing in. That said, the hedge funds with big research budgets focus on large companies, leaving more opportunity in smaller stocks.

Right, I see this all the time. I never see any examples of what this looks like. Did your friend give you anything regarding that?

Buffet’s latest letter mentions active investors as those who buy with intent to sell, whereas he passively buys without intent to sell.

Buffett is pretty much the exact opposite of a boglehead. Buffett's strategy is to only pick winners. Jack Bogle was in the portfolio theory camp, buying companies regardless of if they appeared good or bad. Both can be profitable, but the boglehead strategy is much easier to do.

Apple at $1000 is not a winner. GameStop at $1 is a winner. If you are Buffet you can start doubting the price that the market sets for the stock. If you are a normal person you will probably be wrong more often than the market so don't bother contradicting it.

Buffett only invests in businesses he likes or could come to like. The best example recently is his divesting of airlines as he realized he no longer loved the business.