this is a somewhat obvious comment, but the notion of &quot;an average individual&quot; and &quot;everyone&quot; is very different.<p>some people can specialise in price discovery as their occupation, and some people can specialise in growing sweet potato, or teaching kids, or nursing, or what have you. the former person can spend their time and energy learning how to pick stocks by hand, and influence the market, and the latter people can spend their time and energy learning and doing other useful things, and they can invest in index funds.<p>Here&#x27;s a completely different angle of attack:<p>suppose I believe that the market doesn&#x27;t price things correctly, and that some countries&#x2F;sectors&#x2F;companies are over valued, and some are under valued. in general, for some arbitrary set of of unpopular beliefs, there isn&#x27;t an index fund I can buy into that is a good approximation of my beliefs. Even worse, it probably isn&#x27;t possible for me to build a portfolio by linearly combining different index funds to approximate my desired portfolio allocation.<p>For example, suppose I want to invest in countries A,B,C,D,E and sectors U,V,W,X,Y,Z subject to ethical constraints K and L.<p>It may be the case that for each of the countries I can buy an A-country-ETF, and a B-country-ETF, and a global-sector-U-ETF, and a global-ethical-K-ETF, and for large countries I may even be able to buy a country-C-sector-X-ETF, but I can&#x27;t make a good approximation of my desired portfolio by adding linear combinations of these things together.<p>I don&#x27;t really want to buy an canned portfolio in the form of an ETF, I want to buy a custom portfolio, or a custom portfolio factory, say.<p>But perhaps part of the success of ETFs for non-expert folk like me is that they&#x27;d prevent me from expressing my strange individual beliefs about the market (which will probably result in worse investment outcomes for me than if I just did something mainstream).