Everything that has been stated by others above regarding the advantages individual investors have is absolutely true. It was mentioned above that individuals cannot beat the ‘pros’. Of course individuals as a group cannot consistently beat the very best of the pros. But what Yuval does, and I do, is to trade the small, illiquid stocks that the pros cannot trade. The people trading those stocks are mostly untrained individuals that dont have access to tools like P123. If you had to choose between fighting Tyson in his prime or some random dude on the street, which would you choose? I fully believe that somebody like Yuval that has spent the time to educate himself and learn how to use the tools available on the site, will consistently beat the stock indexes by a wide margin.
I started using P123 in 2004. At that time I knew very little about the markets. I spent a lot of time in the 2000s reading books and experimenting on the site to see what factors and rules actually worked. I still do research projects from time to time, but mostly I just use systems built on my prior research. My point is, I am not the same caliber of investor as Yuval or as many others on this site.
I have 9 accounts that hold p123 stocks and they all have other things mixed in, so the stats are not helpful. The better way to show my P123 returns is a screenshot of my P123 systems. Since 2004, I have manually entered every trade, so the returns are accurate. I currently have 8 portfolios running. They are sorted by 1Y return in the image. 3 of them are new this year, so they dont have 1Y stats yet. 2 of those are sector specific (banks and energy). For the 5 that have 1Y stats, the average was 53%. But 1YR doest mean much. Look at the Total Return vs the Bench Return - that is what is important.
As for survivorship bias, I can address that also. For as long as I can remember, whenever I decide to stop investing in a system, I switch it to ‘auto’ rebalance and move it to my ‘live at one time’ folder and let it run forever so I can see how it does. Most of them have commissions and slippage set. I dont think I ever deleted anything from that folder, but I cant say for sure. Another part of my process is to create a ‘baseline’ copy of every system I invest in. It is a copy of my live system but it runs on auto rebalance. I use that to see how my choice to override the system have worked out. The ‘live at one time’ folder also has those old baselines - that is why there are 80 systems in that folder - it is actually probably 50 or so unique systems.
Of those 80, there are 13 with negative returns this year. 7 of those are gold/silver stock systems (there are only 2 other sector specific systems). There are 5 with 0% 1Y returns - those are meaningless since they were turned off and didnt auto rebalance. If you take out those 12 systems, then the average 1Yr returns for my retired systems was 44.4%. Leave the gold systems in and the average is 37.9%.
I would rate myself as a horrible investor. At any given time, I am more likely to think the market will be going down rather than up. I could never do the ‘buy and hold’ strategy where I hold stocks after my retirement accounts are down 40%. I would sell and miss the rebound. So my strategy has been to hold P123 stocks with some sector ETFs mixed in and heavily hedge. Those hedges have been expensive, but they protect me from myself and have allowed me to beat the market since 2004 and never loose any sleep at night. I would not have been able to do this without P123.