Very, very few investors know how they've done compared to indexes. Notable are how-to books on investing. When checked out, many of the authors can't prove their claimed investing success.
Most famous is the case of the Beardstown Ladies Investing Club. Supposedly those little old ladies from Beardstown Illinois were beating the indexes... and beating Harvard & MIT MBAs with their homespun approach to picking stock. Their books were best-sellers that played a huge role in boosting stock clubs years ago.
Their 90s publishing empire fell apart when outside auditor Price Waterhouse found the club had actually done rather poorly. PW blamed the error on the difficulty of measuring portfolio return. Fraud wasn't blamed although some lawsuits were filed.
Many newsletters too have been asked to substantiate claims of extraordinary success. Most decline. BTW, my Vanguard index funds and ETFs like SPY have expenses in the range of 0.15% or less. I don't think that Buffett can invest cheaper than that. You'll note that I'm a free member of IHUB.
By the way, I'm a lawyer and I bought my first stock at age 19... long ago. Stockwise, I didn't fall off the dot-com bubble turnip truck like most here.
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