>But the stock market is supposed to be hyper efficient nowadays such that it's practically impossible to outperform it even for the experts
That's not true at all. Maybe in commodities, or foreign exchange or indexing, where algos can trade solely based on prices and public information it is true. But definitely not in individual stock picking. Domain knowledge is king here.
I'm not an efficient market hypothesis proponent in the least, but nearly every study, simulation, etc does in fact show that it is nearly impossible to beat the market via stock picking.
Also as an aside, commodities and foreign exchange are places where it is explicitly allowed to have non-public information...
That's not true at all. Maybe in commodities, or foreign exchange or indexing, where algos can trade solely based on prices and public information it is true. But definitely not in individual stock picking. Domain knowledge is king here.