It's not hard to make money in the market. It's not hard to see real, after-tax, inflation adjusted gains. Carefully picking companies in a buy-and-hold strategy is a reliable place to park your money for 3-8% growth.
These guys aren't pretending to be day-traders. Looking at fund performance, as I'm sure you know, very very few managed funds beat the market with any consistency. There's too much hand-wavy "the big banks and funds play the little guy as a pawn" paranoia. Yes, you can make yourself a pawn by trying to play Gordon Gecko with your E-Trade account. But cost-averaging into a stock that you chose and believe in is both effective and open to everybody.
And who knows. There are well told stories of amateur investors making literally billions of dollars finding holes in option contracts that the hedge funds and IBanks missed.