On day one of finance class, they teach you markets are efficient. It’s a funny thing to teach aspiring investors. What the finance professor is saying is that there aren’t excess returns lying around the markets, so you shouldn’t bother trying to find them. The strictest version of this holds that all excess investing returns are a fluke. As the Princeton finance professor Burton Malkiel put it in his book A Random Walk Down Wall Street, “a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s financial pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by experts.” …

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