[cormacrelf]

You missed the point entirely, which is a bit sad for the amount of effort I put into writing all that. It is right there in the bit you quoted. Individuals may do poorly or they may do well. The market as a whole, as you point out, is likely to do better than individual investors. The reason the market does well as a whole is that individual correct predictions are rewarded and incorrect ones are not, and there are a lot of people guessing. The smart ones tend to use more money and account for a lot of the market's overall intelligence, and the small fish tend to be dumber, so you would expect a Pareto distribution of performance of individual investors.

If your evidence that people aren't making good predictions is that the market itself does better, then... who do you think the market is made up of? It's just more people!

Are you really trying to argue that people aren't trying to predict the future when they buy a stock? Or are you just butting your head against these concepts and getting nowhere?