Based on your financial expertise, provide your response or viewpoint on the given financial question or topic. The response format is open.

Dalbar: How can the average investor lose money?
How is it possible for the average investor to underperform the market? The "average" investor probably makes some bad decisions. You also might need to take transaction costs into play (including borrowing on margin), so that there's a natural "erosion" of returns across the market.  Meaning if transaction/borrowing costs are 1%, and the market return is 5%, the "average investor"  Alternatively, if by "average" they mean the average of the population, not weighted by amount, it's plausible that the mass of smaller investors perform slightly worse than the smaller number of large investors (and have larger relative transaction costs), thus having a lower average on a per-capita basis. Doesn't the fact that investors can consistently underperform the market by making poor decisions, imply that an investor could consistently outperform the market by making the opposite decisions? No.  If my investment decisions cause me to earn only a 10% return compared to the "average" 12% return, then making the opposite decision will cause me to lose 10%, not to make 14%.