David, I don't know what your definition of "beating the market" is. What my friends did was to try to find undervalued small caps by looking at the fundamenta

David, I don't know what your definition of "beating the market" is. What my friends did was to try to find undervalued small caps by looking at the fundamentals. In that sense, what they were doing was more "investing" than "trading". It worked really well for a while, then one of the companies failed to bring a product to the market on time and the stock took a nose dive. Well, the lesson to learn is that due diligence is a wonderful thing. In the arrogance of youth, these guys thought that looking at P/E ratios and other such figures would make them rich. They lost some money, but they're wiser now ;-)