3 ideas
A 1% annual fee looks small only when measured against total assets; measured against the return an investor actually earns above a risk-free or index baseline, it consumes a large share of the gain. Because index funds already deliver the market return at near-zero cost, an active manager's fee has to be paid out of outperformance that most managers fail to produce, so the cost is close to certain while the benefit is not.
Before costs, active managers as a group own the market, so their average return must equal the market's return. After fees, trading costs, and taxes, the average active investor has to trail a low-cost index fund, and the few who beat it in one period rarely keep beating it later. An individual who buys the whole market therefore outperforms most experts without any skill in picking managers or stocks.
The investor puts a fixed amount into the market at regular intervals, which buys more shares when prices are low and fewer when they are high, so no one has to guess when to enter. Once a year the investor sells whichever asset class has grown past its target allocation and buys the one that has lagged. The schedule forces buying low and selling high mechanically, and it overrides the emotional pull to chase recent winners or panic-sell in downturns.