The amount of effort an individual investor should need to exert to beat the market should be somewhere around the average amount of effort individual investors exert into the market (you may need to weight that average for the amount of money at stake—i/e, a large investor counts more than a small one) - once you’ve beaten the average you’ve beaten the market.
As the number of people pursuing the no-effort strategy increases, the amount of effort necessary to beat the market goes down. At some point of strategy saturation the strategy stops being effective.
(In general, the market is a chaotic reactive system; any well-defined strategy is exploitable, and given the nature of the market, is exploited.)
The amount of effort an individual investor should need to exert to beat the market should be somewhere around the average amount of effort individual investors exert into the market (you may need to weight that average for the amount of money at stake—i/e, a large investor counts more than a small one) - once you’ve beaten the average you’ve beaten the market.
As the number of people pursuing the no-effort strategy increases, the amount of effort necessary to beat the market goes down. At some point of strategy saturation the strategy stops being effective.
(In general, the market is a chaotic reactive system; any well-defined strategy is exploitable, and given the nature of the market, is exploited.)