How long does it take to master the piano, golf, carpentry, cooking, chess? Most of us would answer years, if not decades. But the field of investing is very different; instead of producing
stellar results the most seasoned investment managers underperform a basic index fund. In fact, just last month Mark Kritzman of MIT released a study showing that only 3% of investment
managers with decades of experience and huge research staffs were able to beat the performance of the S&P 500 index over the 20-year period from January 1989 to January 2009. In other words,
the simple S&P 500 index achieved stardom (96th percentile) by passively selecting stocks. Studies like this have similar findings for virtually every other 10 and 20-year period.