Sir John Templeton’s Rule No. 13: Outperforming the market is a difficult task

The challenge is not simply making better investment decisions than the average investor. The real challenge is making investment decisions that are better than those of the professionals who manage the big institutions. Remember, the unmanaged market indexes such as the S&P 500 don’t pay commissions to buy and sell stock. They don’t pay salaries to securities analysts or portfolio managers. And, unlike the unmanaged indexes, investment companies are never 100% invested, because they need to have cash on hand to redeem shares. So any investment company that consistently outperforms the market is actually doing a much better job than you might think. And if it not only consistently outperforms the market, but does so by a significant degree, it is doing a superb job