Best to compare it to a known and easily accessible baseline such as index funds / passive investing. You are gambling relative to passive investing, in that you hope for higher returns but statistically you will achieve lower returns. Not that complicated.
Maybe median wise, but not mean. Most ETFs still have fees and they use Authorized participants to make the trades from individual stocks to the ETFs and thus they are also taking a cut. Investing yourself using a no fee broker involves no middleman whatsoever so it cannot possibly achieve a lower return in aggregate.
Yes, of course ETFs take a cut. They are not run by non-profits. They are still a reasonable baseline and standard marker for the broader market, given their typically quite small management fees.
More importantly are you suggestinging individuals buy and weight all components of an ETF like VOO (500 stocks) themselves? Pretty ridiculous. Tracking error is real and there is an extreme time cost which makes hypothetical strategies like that unreasonable for most investors.
I also just don’t understand what your comment has to do with mine in the first place.
Yes, if you used a no fee broker to buy and sell (everyday...) the constituent 500-5000 stocks typically in a large index fund you could avoid the very low management fee.
In practice, that’s ridiculous. The management fee on a good ETF is less than pennies on the dollar. It’s the full time jobs of many people to do this. It takes a lot of time. If you tried to replicate it yourself on an individual basis there would be significant opportunity costs as well as far increased tracking error, as well as other things I’m probably not thinking about off the top of my head. There is a reason no one does that.
I was not commenting about myself. Simply correcting your mistakes. You are not a very sophisticated retail investor and it’s wrong for you to opine to others like this in the face of substantial evidence.
