this post was submitted on 29 Aug 2026
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I showed this to a friend and he was like "but without knowing what's happening in the world, it's a lot harder"
I said, "like insider trading?"
He said "no, no, other stuff."
Insider trading is definitely frequently used to unfairly beat the market but in your friends defense, there is a difference between knowledge of current world and market conditions and insider trading.
Current world and market conditions (non-insider trading) are baked into the prices already.
Are they? When most of the money going into the market is through blind index fund investing, any assumption that stocks are rationally priced seems completely unjustified.
Someone is able to profit off of it, but you have to be far faster than any of us could ever hope to be. There's a lot of money spent on trying to shave nanoseconds off of trading times for this reason. Unless you're working for one of these companies with access, you can't beat them, and the conditions have already been baked in.
You don't need to be an inside-trader to make a better investment than "buy and hold the S&P indefinitely"
I can Beat the Couch in this game very easily if you start the game in 1971 and let me invest in the NASDAQ instead.
Let me buy-and-hold Microsoft or Oracle or NVIDIA and I can do even better.
Stick me with the DOW and I will almost never win.
That has the advantage of hindsight, though. At the time Microsoft came on the market, would you have been as confident as you are now that your buy-in was a good choice? Without knowing how the market is going to move, would you have known that NASDAQ was the right market to pay in? Can you pick the Microsofts and Oracles of today with a high degree of confidence without insider information?
I'm not saying it's not possible, but it would be much more difficult, the confidence wouldn't be as high, and not many people could beat the couch doing it. If it were so easy to beat the couch, a lot more people would be very rich.
It all does. That's the problem with the game. You pick an index over a period during which there's a significant positive return and say the Couch gets the benefit of this return baked in.
But I can't put my money into the S&P from 1929 to 2019. I have to play the market from 2026 onward. There's no guarantee I'll see the same results in the next fifty years that I saw in the last fifty.
You could say the same thing about the S&P. The only reason we're using that instead of, say, the Nikkei (which has an outright negative annual return from 1989 to 2019) is because it gives the couch a baked in advantage.
It's easy to beat the couch if you have an option other than "cash". But it isn't easy to beat the S&P if you have no other information than a few weeks or months worth of stock ticker data.
The bottom line is that you need a theory behind your investment that goes further than "it went up last year, so it must go to next year".
That road leads to a large position in Bitcoin.
A good example: a lot of people have made good money over the last 1-2 years by moving money out from American markets. With Trump getting elected promising to start a global trade war, you didn't have to be Nostradamus to predict that US stocks would underperform.