I thought people would like to know how I did following his stocks (I did Saul for a while and then switched to Bear). I have done it for a full 5 years. I put in a small amount of money, and when it went way up, I sold my original investment, and just played with house money. I calculated my returns and returned 11.85% CAGR.

On one hand that is great. Many people thought they had found the path to retirement at age 35 put all their money into his stocks, right about the time he lost 68.4% of his money in one year. It truly is a tragedy that people lost their life savings. However, if I had bought VOO, my return would have been 13.25% CAGR.

Even though I was not doing the work of listening to conference calls, analyzing the businesses, financial statements and industries; there is so much buying and selling every month that it is a lot of work to do worse than just owning VOO.

I have a good amount of my money in index tracking ETFs, I have a few newsletters that beat the market, and where I really shine, thanks in part to the mechanical investing group, is in fixed income. Preferred stocks, and close end bond funds, so I don’t feel bad about my performance.

To me, the lesson, is that nothing always works in the stock market, and it is very hard to do a lot better than the S and P.