But that's not what those who disagree are saying. Of course it's possible to beat the guaranteed return of overpaying a mortgage. But the argument is that for most people that doesn't happen and overpaying is probably the best / least risky course of action. A few outliers doesn't disprove that.
I have to disagree with you that these people including myself are outliers. The absolute size may put them as outliers, but the percentage returns are not outliers.
You don't have to be a genius to invest wisely, the posters here have been talking about investing in household names or industry stalwarts with billions in revenue, not some penny stock.
In the last 5 years everybody who invested in an S&P 500 the stock market would have beat the return on their mortgage , so beating the guarantee is not an outlier.
What was put out there was that it was statistically unlikely that you can beat the guaranteed return, but that just shows that statistics can suffer from confirmation bias.
@Sarenco selected statistics to support their side of the argument and I just picked a statistic to prove mine.
What you correctly point out and what has been my point all along, is that it is about
Risk. Fundamentally Equities are a riskier asset class than rates and you expect a return premium over the risk free rate for taking that risk, thats how the market works. If Equities offered a return less than the risk free rate then nobody would invest in them.
This is why individuals have a risk tolerance / risk appetite and to go back to the very original point....you should not offer just blanket advice not to invest when you have a mortgage. There are many other inputs that should help an individual form a decision on whether to invest or not. However, most posters on here go for a simple risk averse approach and pay down the mortgage. That isn't because of lending to invest, they just have a low risk tolerance or a simple approach to managing their finances.
However, you can't deny that some investors on here that have higher risk tolerance, have achieved greater returns and some have not. Thats the way it should work......