I think Terrestrial is arguing against the logic that you can't beat the index period, while Walt and Sol are saying - it's stupid to spend money for stock picking advice. I agree with both points of view. Consider that stock pickers don't all use the same strategy. Even on this board, there's talk of momentum investing, or trend following. Different bits of information also means different things to different investors. For example, some investors will outright reject any and all stocks in certain industries, or with a price/earning ratio of more than XXX, while others buy on story and management expectations, etc. Indexing just means you're taking the average opinion of all stock pickers, it's certainly less work, but if you have enough accounting and business evaluation knowledge, and you enjoy the act of learning about businesses, why would you index?
The link on dead investors doing best only shows that lack of activity is good. For any index strategies, your advantages are 1) low trading costs 2) diversification and 3) lack of turnover/taxes. This can be replicated using stock picking too. If your stock picking strategy involves only purchases, and not selling, it's the same thing. The only difference between stock picking and indexing is the amount of diversification. Indexing is agnostic as to price paid and which company to buy, but suppose I don't want to hold stocks that are trading at 100+ PE, or companies in the airline, steel, and ship building industries. Yes, I will lose out on years like 2014 when airline stock increased dramatically, but I will also avoid all of the other years when airlines continuously go bankrupt. Indexing means you're still buying those companies, but beacuse you're diversified well enough, the bankruptcies don't have as much of an effect.
My theory on why this board is so against the idea of stock picking is that people see the evidence on the entire population of indexers vs stock pickers, and automatically go to the first order conclusion that indexing is the only way and stock picking is a dumb idea and anyone who tries to do it is illogical. They don't think to the second order questions of WHY indexing works, and what indexing is, and how prices are set for the indexes, and what all of that wrapped up means for you if you decide to pick which companies to invest in rather than buying the entire market. It's a lazy way to think, and insulting to boot when you insinuate that there are better things to do than sit around and learn about companies when that's what some investors enjoy. Granted, I share your opinion on paying for stock advice and then blindly following, but that doesn't seem to be what Terrestrial is doing here, so why equate what he's doing with what KBecks is doing?