> is barely any more "effort" than buying and holding SPY, as the work is being entirely delegated
Effort is translated to money e.g. you do it yourself or you hire someone to do it; someone is spending that large amount of effort that is valued at millions of dollars/year.
If SPY is so great, then wealthy people would've just bought SPY.
But that's not what they are doing. They pay fund managers top money (think top 0.1% earner) to invest for them.
> Many strategies are dependent on that level of wealth (or designed to address problems that only apply to that level of wealth) for tax-related reasons.
Their main goal is to grow the funds. Tax-saving is secondary at best. Nobody would be okay with shrinking the fund to acquire tax-saving lol.
Yeah, meanwhile all the wealthy people actively manage their port with an insane amount of efforts. They would compensate hedge fund manager with insane amount of money.
Then, they turn around and tell average people to forget about the investment. Just park your money in the index fund over the long run. I mean, if you are either stupid or don't have time, then yeah please only do index fund.
We all know why, and the reason doesn't fit what you want to believe. That's why you pretend to be obscure about it. Otherwise, you would have just said so out loud already.
Most people on HN wouldn't be satisfied using anything. Therefore, probably no