You absolutely can, because you have much less capital to deploy and no strings attached. The sorts of opportunities you’re looking for and they’re looking for

You absolutely can, because you have much less capital to deploy and no strings attached. The sorts of opportunities you’re looking for and they’re looking for can be totally disjoint. Some friends and I made a bit of easy money in college on very good derivatives trades that only existed at tiny volumes (low thousands). There’s lots of good reasons to invest passively but being unable to compete with big funds isn’t necessarily one of them.