> More dollars have flowed to index strategies that track a market benchmark, such as the S&P 500 index, partly because such funds typically have lower costs than active funds and more investors believe that stock-picking managers can't regularly beat the financial markets.
> Now a new Morningstar study, released this week at the Morningstar Investment Conference, finds that actively managed funds lagged their passive counterparts across nearly all asset classes, especially over a 10-year period from 2004 to 2014.
"Essentially nobody" is admittedly not well-defined, but I don't take it to mean that a handful of guys doing better would disprove it (and in any case have trouble finding any data points in favor of the opposite position).
I claim that the top 20% (as specified in the headline) could not be reasonably described as "essentially nobody". And the article you linked two posts ago found that more than 20% of funds beat the market.
That's over the course of a year, which is not what I would consider a long-term measure. Over the course of the year, sure, you could easily have people who beat the market.
