Comment by mycorrhizal

Because it has been very well demonstrated that almost all active investors, fund managers etc... virtually never beat the market cumulatively over decades. There are some exceptions, but not more than you would expect from random chance due to large sample size (a lot of people playing). So given that information why should most of us spend the effort trying to beat the market especially considering the low expense ratio on some really solid ETFs. Generally speaking if you expect the economy to continue to grow for the next few decades than index funds are a pretty good option.