Success Quote by Merton Miller

“Of course” does a lot of quiet flexing here. Miller opens as if the debate is settled, then smuggles in a worldview: the market isn’t just a casino, it’s an information processor with a better operating system than any individual stock picker. The line reads like practical advice, but it’s also a manifesto from the Chicago-school, efficient-markets tradition that Miller helped legitimize in modern finance.

The intent is twofold. On the surface, it’s consumer guidance: most people should stop paying for the fantasy of outsmarting everyone else and buy the market cheaply. Underneath, it’s a shot at the entire industry built on claiming informational advantage. If prices already “incorporate information,” then the average active manager is charging you to run in place.

The key move is the phrase “amazingly successful devices.” Miller anthropomorphizes markets as machinery: decentralized, impersonal, brutally competitive systems that punish slow or private interpretations and reward speed and scale. That framing turns “passive investing” from a timid default into an evidence-based posture of humility. You’re not giving up; you’re acknowledging a crowd intelligence forged by incentives.

Context matters: this comes from an era when finance was trying to become more like physics, with models, proofs, and the emerging gospel of indexing. Miller isn’t saying markets are fair or wise. He’s saying they’re efficient at a narrower task: digesting publicly available information into prices fast enough that your cleverness, after fees, is usually just expensive self-expression.