With time and focus any person can beat the market. The market is wildly irrational, so rational actions are not the deciding factor. It is being able to spend

With time and focus any person can beat the market. The market is wildly irrational, so rational actions are not the deciding factor. It is being able to spend all your time and focus watching the data. The question is whether this can be reliably outsourced to machines and what level of effort will it take. A very simple exercise is to go and watch the live data for a single stock for 1 hour. You will see that it moves up and down and has trends. After 1 hour you can have an idea of an entry point, pretend to pick one, continue to watch, the odds are much greater than 50% that at some point the stock will go above your entry point in the next hour. It only doesn't if you bought into the top of a solid downward trend. And that is the very basic example, but pair that with an understanding of options and a hedge strategy for the unlikely chance that you bought in at the top of a solid downward trend. The last piece is to watch and understand Level II data and I reliably believe anyone can "beat" the market. The issue is that you literally have to monitor it consistently with a clear focus, can you do that with more than one security? What portion can we reliably have machines do without some risk that the machine makes a tremendous error and blows up the account?