Speaking as a former aspiring fund manager turned software developer, most of the tools at these manager's disposal are simplistic and completely invalid yet in most cases the manager's don't quite understand them anyways.
Bottom-line: its a boys club of MBAs whose curriculum still says the sharpe ratio is important and holds their students responsible for at the very most being able to calculate probabilities from a normal distro using a table of values.
Solution: invest in a lot of risky small companies, you will lose most of the time but, those few winners more than make up for the loss. Spread across enough bets stats says its very unlikely to lose. Contrast that with your family's 401k split in two a few years back while invested in the "blue-chips"
The research shows that the passive index tracking approach very convincingly beats actively managed portfolios net of taxes and fees.
I don't understand why Average Joe thinks he can beat investment firms long term with staff dedicated to tracking each and every tradeable asset. Who do you think you're trading with?
If you want to gamble on a company or a market shift then fine, but for the most part that's just what it is - gambling.
There are of course lots of reasons many individual traders are not successful. Lack of discipline and poor money management are far bigger contributors to individual trader failure than lack of dedicated staff and institutional tools.