It seems like you are equating the author's argument with the efficient market hypothesis. A few others on this thread have made a similar indication. While con

It seems like you are equating the author's argument with the efficient market hypothesis. A few others on this thread have made a similar indication. While conclusions of both the OP and the EMH are similar (you will not/cannot beat the market), the underlying arguments are really pretty different. The OP really doesn't invoke an efficient market at all in his arguments. His argument follows the line of statistical studies (eg http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Barber-Odean%202011.pdf http://www.umass.edu/preferen/You%20Must%20Read%20This/Barbe...) of individual investor performance, which conclude fairly uniformly that the average individual investor underperforms the market average, for a variety of emotional, strategic, and competitive (dis)advantage based reasons. The bottom line of this sort of study/argument is that individual investors tend to act on the belief that they have better information than the market. But, when your opponent is a professional, and you are an amateur, you are going to get beaten more often than not. See evidence in your own comment the belief that you could, in certain situations, understand market behavior just by looking at it: "betting against moves that seem largely caused by "dumb" capital". How could you possibly know that a market move was caused by "dumb" capital? Even if you could, how could you expect to know this better than professionals? All of this, to be clear, is talking about long term, population-wide averages. Everyone can get lucky once, and some outliers get lucky more than average.