SeattleCPA,
I don't think many (
any?) others here consider '
beating the market' to mean 'within the class or subclass average.' And you won't find people here discussing the alpha return, the beta, the subclass avg., etc. None of that is necessary to keep it simple, buy n' hold Index investors.
If the news says 'The market was down today', we all know what that means. 'The Market' is the Total U.S. Stock Market (basically identical-
enough to the S&P 500 and similar-ish to the Dow) and the core fund almost everyone here has, recommends, assumes people are talking about if you say 'stocks' (along with Total
Intl. Market) -incl. the advice MMM has always preached.
That's why the rare person who posts 'Time to get into Oil!... Health Care!... Banks!... Emerging Markets!... Tesla!... Netflix!... gets no traction here.
Most investors don't beat the market simply because they own bonds to lower volatility, but no one expects bonds to beat the market (long term), so we can all reasonably assume 'beating the market' is talking about 'within my
stock allocation'.
If I would've promoted say... the T Rowe Price Media-Telecom fund I'm in, it would be easy for people to counter, 'Yeah, you beat the market, but you have NO idea if that'll keep going. We could see another tech crash like in 2000. That's why the rest of us just own the total market and don't try to pick the winners.'
But what I was saying is that 'owning the total market' is mostly just owning the very top MEGA GIANTS (like ~150 companies with something like ~80% of the money). You own little else of everything else... so you might consider
over-weighting yourself in MidCap Blend (my advice) or SmallCap Value (the article's advice from this thread)
https://forum.mrmoneymustache.com/investor-alley/why-vanguard-total-stock-market-isnt-the-best-fund-in-the-fleet/, or
both is plenty smart and even more diversified, too.
You'd still be 100% in low cost Indexes where you're still not picking winners any more than someone in the Total Market/500 Index. I'd argue even
less so, really -since Apple, Google, etc.'s futures are much less critical to me than someone only in the Total Market/500.
You'd safely, reasonably,
mostly keep following the overall market... but you'll
probably beat it.