Won't successful founders from YC will have the opportunity to work on what they want no matter how much money they have? Or do the founders you know want to work on things that are very expensive?
To beat the market you HAVE to predict what trades others will make in the future. It is easy to use math to make it appear to be a numbers game but that is just abstraction. The reality is that people buy and sell stocks for 1000s of different reasons.