> You mention that plenty of individual funds did beat the S&P. This is straight an apocryphal anecdotal fallacy. No, no it isn't. Individual funds have beaten

> You mention that plenty of individual funds did beat the S&P. This is straight an apocryphal anecdotal fallacy. No, no it isn't. Individual funds have beaten the market for 20 - 30 years at a time. You won't even hear about most of them unless you really go digging, for a combination of reasons: 1. Funds that actually, consistently beat the market quickly find themselves in possession of more money than they know what to do with. They don't need to advertise themselves to the market, because they can find plenty of capital at the terms they want within their own network. Why inflate your fund to the size and publicity of Bridgewater if you can avoid it? The salesmanship of a given fund is typically inversely proportional to the return it achieves. 2. Per #1, when I say they have more money than they know what to do with, I mean that literally - they hit capacity constraints on their trading strategies and eventually cannot use more capital profitably even if they wanted to. They can spin off satellite funds to test out various strategies, but by and large the secret sauce engine will have to grow at a much slower rate from then on. This further compounds reason #1 - not only do they not need to seek out investor capital, they'll eventually stop being "on the market" for new investors at all, further reducing their publicity. 3. Finally, having investors is a logistical burden. The only reason to actually have outside capital is to pool risk so you - once you have enough capital and you've hit a capacity such that you can no longer scale up, you might as well return the investors' money and close the fund to outside investment. Why share the risk when you're already wealthy and have been doing this for 20 years? Everyone has heard of Renaissance Technologies because they're legendary, but in my opinion we are lucky to even know about them to the extent that we do. Had James Simons not needed to pool risk and take outside investment in the initial days, we would likely not know about him beating the market with an average 70% return for three decades. There are many funds, like TGS Management, which are essentially comparable to RenTec but which far fewer people know about because they have no reason to be known. I concede that this is not helpful information for an investor trying to figure out where to park money for legitimately superior returns, but that's a different matter than the fact that these funds do exist and that this bet is basically irrelevant for them.