"It is pretty much impossible for some man or woman or child who devotes a couple of hours per week to the market to outperform the professionals who spend 24×

"It is pretty much impossible for some man or woman or child who devotes a couple of hours per week to the market to outperform the professionals who spend 24×7 doing this for a living and when they are asleep, they have a workforce full of people doing more of the same. In this day and age, none of us are smarter than the market." I agree that individual investors can't continue to try and play in the big leagues. When you're competing with bankers, you're going to lose because they're doing it 24/7, like Mark said. However, there is a significant amount of the market (30%? Tried to google the figure and couldn't find it) that Wall Street doesn't cover, analyze or do much of anything about. For the most part, this is the playing field for the individual investor. My only other advice is buy at a profit. Use value investing tenets to buy stocks that are significantly discounted to their fair value. It's much easier to calculate the value of a company than most think.