To be fair, that's really only surprising to people who believe the strong EMH proposition is true. EMH is demonstrably false if you casually look at the return

To be fair, that's really only surprising to people who believe the strong EMH proposition is true. EMH is demonstrably false if you casually look at the returns of various funds over timespans measured in decades. The only way you can argue it isn't false is if you bend over backwards to redefine these firms as havens for insider trading or try to claim they're plausible as mere statistical outliers. Otherwise, the weaker postulate of EMH is sort of redundant. That's not to discredit Fama's work: we know far more now then we did back then, and it's legitimately useful as a theory of the relationship between market state and information asymmetry. But its utility has nothing to do with whether or not the market actually is efficient.