This is what I did years ago at a young age to satisfy my curiosity: I had an IRA and a taxable index fund (Vanguard S&P 500) that I put an equal amount of money in. My goal was to trade within the IRA(since no tax consequences if I did not take money out of the IRA) to see if I could beat the returns of the index fund. I was the type of person that needed to have skin in the game to really focus. Rules: I would not touch the index fund but trade as often as I wanted within the IRA, and keep track over time. I thought it would be a no-brainer --- that I would easily beat the index fund because I would keep up with the news, wouldn't have to pay any tax, read Value Line and Morningstar nearly daily, buy when I had a "good feeling", use business cycles to my advantage, etc. Of course, I was convinced that I was smarter than everyone else! Bottom line: Occasionally, over very short periods of time (up to a couple of months at various times), I was able to beat the index returns, but when I looked year to year, or over 2 to 3 years time, I didn't even come close. Depending on the comparison time interval, I typically was 2 to 6% below the index. How could that be? Eventually I gave up trying to beat the market and put all of my investments on automatic pilot, mostly through dollar cost averaging. Some 30 years later, I am so glad I did. It was the primary reason that I was able to be FI and retire early.
