Economists and finance people love (or hate) this kind of rhetorical conjecture almost as much as the Marketers.

All things being equal, the “Average” indexed investor is going nowhere relative to their peers.

Everything here hinges on the word “can”.

The premise of this (sponsored?) piece is that technology democratizes downstream financial markets for the benefit of those in tune with new offerings - it’s true - but I suspect that the distribution of total market returns has hardly materially increased for “average” investors after fees and other transactional costs and where they have, it’s been the result of what I see as the index bubble where market participants stay-put in their positions rather than trying to time the market.

Index rebalancing is work left to others. There is an interesting opportunity here for data-containing providers of such services. Do they sell their data? Can I buy that?

Meanwhile, a rising tide does lift all boats. It’s kind of hard to argue that.