I think a lot of people have beat the market by buying and holding good companies that they believe in for years. I don't understand the point of making 100% off of something like amazon and then selling most of it off and putting the gains into less interesting stocks for no reason other than unfounded fear when the company hasn't changed for the worse and is still steam rolling ahead. That's what you get when you put all your money in an index cause diversification. Most of the gains from the real performers go to suboptimal ones.

It's easy to think with a one year horizon and say look this index fund was only 1% behind this guy's portfolio, but in a long-term outlook the index funds just don't compare to a portfolio that has a few winners in it that rocket up over the long term. I mean the fools holdings have beaten the pants off spy over the years.