I wrote this five years ago on Medium, but I have some new comments below. https://medium.datadriveninvestor.com/why-investors-cannot-outperform-simple-benchmarks-d6a587a54967 So many people are focused on fees, liquidity and strategy transparency. Well, everyone can access their beloved index funds at zero fees with daily liquidity and easily find how the indexes, such as the S&P 500, are constructed.