Exactly. There are occasionally fund managers who beat the market for a few years at a time. None have ever done it long-term.
This isn't even sort of true, many active value investing managers outperform the market for years on end. There's an old joke about Warren Buffet as related by Charlie Munger,
Efficient market theory [is] a wonderful economic doctrine that had a long vogue in spite of the experience of Berkshire Hathaway. In fact one of the economists who won — he shared a Nobel Prize — and as he looked at Berkshire Hathaway year after year, which people would throw in his face as saying maybe the market isn’t quite as efficient as you think, he said, “Well, it’s a two-sigma event.” And then he said we were a three-sigma event. And then he said we were a four-sigma event. And he finally got up to six sigmas — better to add a sigma than change a theory, just because the evidence comes in differently.
For reference, the probability of a six sigma event is about one per billion.
Joel Greenblatt (30% outperformance per year for 20 years)
Charlie Munger (17% outperformance for 12 years)
Benjamin Graham (10% outperformance for 20 years)
Walter Schloss (6% outperformance for 49 years) (!)
John Templeton (2.7% outperformance for 50 years) (!) (Does 50 years count as long term?)
David Einhorn (10% for 18 years)
Warren Buffet (13% for 54 years)
(and many more...)
Finance is a funny thing. For some reason, people don't have any problem believing that it is possible for a human being to figure out how to go to the moon, while simultaneously admitting that they personally are not a rocket scientist. In investing, it seems like you can't tell people that it's possible for a person to do rocket science, without them running into their backyard and blowing themselves up playing with things they know nothing about. The backlash, where otherwise smart folk defend an idea so patently false (that it is impossible to beat the market), is as absurd as insisting that the moon landings must have been faked because the average person can't figure out how to build a booster engine.
The problem has never been that no-one can beat the market. The problems have always been A) that it is hard to beat the market while running a fund (rules are often onerous), and B) that it is very hard for a non-expert to correctly identify folks that will beat the market
in advance. The idea that no one can beat the market in the long run is a very useful, wrong idea. It is good if most people believe it; because most people, when trying to beat the market, underperform very tragically. (Something like 6% or so underperformance I think). The OP's financial advisor is probably not incentivized to lead them to managers which will outperform in the future. The OP's advisor may not be capable of leading them to managers which will outperform in the future. Still...let's not go around making up facts.