It's common to have the belief that you should be over-performing the S&P 500 with your money, and thus people will go and search for performance in these place

It's common to have the belief that you should be over-performing the S&P 500 with your money, and thus people will go and search for performance in these places. In practice beating the index is very very hard. It's impossible on average if all you are investing in is the assets of the index and something like the S&P500 or the MSCI World is diversified enough that beating it even with availability of all sorts of other assets to trade is far from trivial as well. If you are a retail investor you should just aim to buy the market average as cheaply as possible. After all you're not contributing anything special to the market so what makes you think you should be able to extract excess returns?