There is insufficient information in the market by design as evidenced by the existence of material nonpublic information. Anyone who knows MNPI can make quite

There is insufficient information in the market by design as evidenced by the existence of material nonpublic information. Anyone who knows MNPI can make quite a lot of money which is why the SEC exists to regulate how that information can be used in the broader market. To the extent that sufficient intelligence can reverse engineer or infer the private books and planning of public companies and the likely outcomes it can outperform other investors and make the market even more efficient. Modeling global economies is hard; even regional models are hard and a large part why 20th century communism performed poorly compared to open markets (the others being internal corruption and external interference). Therefore I think individual humans have neither the capital reserves (bigger risks can be taken ~safely with more capital) nor the intelligence to beat the current markets. But it's not a zero-sum game and the global economy is still growing so if one's net outcome over several years is negative then it's probably due to bad strategy (e.g. picking stocks by hand, not diversifying) as opposed to bad luck.