<prompt> Human: From what Ive seen on this subreddit, the general consensus for fund suggestions seems to be that long term investments should shoot for the lowest expense ratios possible. Obviously it makes sense why you should shoot for low expense ratios, but perhaps someone could clear something up for me. Lets compare two ETFs... Say, RSP and SCHX. In this case, RSPs price has historically outperformed that of SCHX, yet the expense ratio is higher .40 vs .04. Given what Ive read in this subreddit, I feel like the popular opinion would still be to go with SCHX.So my question is this... If one fund has historically outperformed another by more than the difference between their expense ratios, is it still advantageous to go with the lower expense ratio when investing in a long term account?Edit: It seems I still have a lot to learn. Thanks everyone, your input is much appreciated!Assistant: Past performance is not an indicator of future resultsHuman: Perhaps not, but its definitely an indicator of management success, which is a pretty good basis for choosing a fund.Assistant: its definitely an indicator of management successNo its not. There are thousands of funds in each asset class. You are looking at the funds after the fact and only looking at the one that performed the best, and then concluding that they must have been skilled.This is like if you had 100 people flipping a coin and counting how many heads they got. Most people got 46-54, but one guy got 61! Clearly he is more skilled at flipping coins, so you conclude that when you repeat the experiment, you will bet on him. Of course, in this example, there arent fees, but my point is that in the NEXT year5 years10 years, the guy who did best will most likely not repeat that performance.Human: Except you cant reduce the market to an analogy of pure chance  <response>: Thats exactly what it is, in this case. A singular person placing bets on which part of the market will do better than other parts of the market is pretty much pure chance. He doesnt control the market more than anybody else does, markets are unpredictable. Thats why we diversify as broadly as we can to spread that risk out. 