How to Make Money in an Index Fund

You can't get lucky in an index fund. And if some strategy made 4 or 5% a year, well they either did it with stock company selection or they did it with timing. You have to be aware that within that small cap value arena you could have performance for 10 years that could be very misleading. The point is with indexes it isn't a piece of cake and there's still some understanding that you have to have but you can look at shorter periods of time theoretically and get an idea of their performance.