Victory Lap - Results of the Stock Market Experiment

This one's for all the aspies out there

Trigger warning: this post will not be humble. I am going to brag a lot, call out a lot of self-proclaimed “experts” for their mistakes, and generally act like an asshole to the people whom I dislike. This might sound like the typical prelude to a presidential campaign, but I promise you that I am not currently running for office. So if you are heartbroken and emotionally triggered that you are unable to vote for somebody who is giving you this level of straight-talking honesty, well… that’s on you for ignoring the trigger warning.

Recently I did something very interesting. I decided in advance that in three years or less, I was going to triple my money on the stock market, and I wrote a book about superforecasting to indicate what my methodology was going to be - as well as to prove to any doubters that I had predicted my success in advance. Then I went ahead and fulfilled the goal that I had predicted - I tripled my money in less than three years. If you want to read the details of how I accomplished this, you can find that story here and here. This post is exclusively about the metrics. I want to discuss the data, slice it up in several different ways for easy analysis, and preemptively respond to a few criticisms that I anticipate my detractors attacking me with.

The whole point of this little exercise was to demonstrate that many of our so-called “expert” economists and market gurus are actually incompetent idiots who don’t know what they’re talking about. It’s great that I was able to make a lot of money over the past three years (exactly as I predicted) but the larger point that I’m trying to make is that I’m a much better investor and forecaster in general than many of these Ivy League idiots who run our markets, because I use a more effective methodology. My science of Game Theory is a far more effective way to predict the market than classical economics. So let’s talk about the metrics and the results, so I can prove it to you.

According to Warren Buffett, one of the people generally considered most qualified to speak intelligently about investing, the average annual stock market return is 7 percent. Over the past three years, my average annual stock market returns were 50 percent. In other words, I did 7 times better than the stock market.

But what if you cherry picked that timeframe?

That’s a really good question. Let’s take a look at some different timeframes and compare my investments results from those periods to the market average.

My average return per year over the past five years is 32 percent, or 4.5 times better than the average stock market return.

My average return per year over the past seven years is 25 percent, or 3.5 times better than the stock market.

My average return per year over all time (including the very first years that I started investing, when I didn’t have any experience or knowledge at all) is 19 percent. That's 2.6 times better than the average stock market return.

As you can see, on average I outperformed the market substantially no matter how you slice the data. This is not a one-off, or even a two-off. This is me regularly and consistently outperforming the market - even from year 1 - because my analytical methods are just better and more scientific than what our so-called “experts” use.

But what if you had one really good year where you got lucky and that threw the average off? Everybody can get lucky.

That’s a really good point. The best way to prove that my average wasn’t thrown off by one statistical anomaly is to use a trimmed mean - in other words, take the average but with the highest 10% and lowest 10% of all values removed. (In my case, since I have 11 years worth of data, I’ll just drop both the highest performing and lowest performing year.) This would give me a more smoothed average, without the results skewed by any wild outliers.

My trimmed mean return per year is 11.5 percent, still more than 50% above the market average. This isn’t luck. We’ve sliced the data in every way possible to eliminate that possibility. In fact, looking at different timeframes supports my position, because as the timeframe gets closer and closer to the present day, you can see that my investment skills are improving, but even when I first started I was handily outperforming the market.

I don’t believe you. You might just be lying about your stock returns, or only displaying your best-performing portfolio while hiding your poorly-performing portfolios.

Well, I might also be lying about being human. I might be a dog, a fox, or an alien typing this out on the internet. How would you even know? We’re all the same hidden behind a keyboard.

Let’s be realistic. There’s only one way to prove that I’m being honest about my stock returns, and that’s for me to show a reputable investigative journalist my account results and stock trading history and have them do some independent investigation of me to verify that I don’t have any other hidden bank accounts or anything like that. I’m not willing to give out the details of my bank statements to randos on the internet, and even if I was dumb enough to do that, you could always say that it was irrelevant because I might have multiple brokerage accounts and was only giving out the details of the specific brokerage fund with the highest returns. And that would be a valid criticism. No information that I gave you online on the internet would be enough to conclusively verify my bona fides. Only somebody who could meet me in person, had my real identity, and was able to do a thorough investigation of me would be able to prove that I wasn’t deceiving you by fudging the data in such a way.

This is why I’m declaring publicly here that I’m willing to allow a reporter to do exactly that in order to prove that I’m telling the truth. Once they’ve verified it and my credentials have been established, I’ll cheerfully go public with my real name. So if you don’t believe me and want to challenge what I’m saying here, just call a journalist and put them in touch with me. Supposedly our mainstream media has a ton of crack reporters out there doing cutting edge investigative research, but when a guy says publicly that he can predict the future and is willing to show the numbers to prove it, nobody even has the time to check whether or not he’s telling the truth? Perhaps these “expert reporters” are too busy writing woke opinion pieces about the unbearable whiteness of being: after all that does seem to be mainstream media’s current clickbait revenue model at the moment.

Other people have made stock returns as good as this or better in the past. What makes your achievement unique?

Did they predict beforehand that they were going to do well in the stock market? If so, was it the first prediction they made? Or the second? Or the fifth? Because that’s pretty relevant to what we’re measuring, isn’t it?

Suppose that somebody predicted beforehand that they were going to make a lot of money in the stock market… but they didn’t - they lost money instead. Then they predicted again that they were going to make a lot of money, but again they were wrong. Then - on the fifth time they made this prediction, they got it right. That’s not very impressive, is it? I mean, anybody can keep on predicting the same thing over and over until finally it happens to come true. What’s important is not just whether the prediction is true but also your percentage rate of success. If I make four predictions and three of them turn out to come true, that’s a lot more impressive than when an economist makes forty predictions and six of them happen to come true, because I have a 75% success rate and he has a 15% success rate. The economist might have double the total number of successful predictions, but that means nothing if he makes a ton of predictions and most of them happen to be wrong. You can’t have a lot of confidence in that guy’s predictions because they often turn out to be wrong: he’s just throwing wild guesses against the wall and seeing what sticks.

By contrast, I made one prediction, and I was so completely confident in it that I even spent months writing a book about my superforecasting ability and publishing it before my prediction came true. You know that I’m not making a ton of failed predictions because there is only one book I published. Any particular banker or economist you’re comparing me to might have made more money in one particular investment or another, but their overall percentage rate of success - which is a much better measurement of skill - is almost certainly lower than mine. Think about it: these con artists aren’t even confident enough in their predictions to publish them in advance! If they really believed that they had an overall record of predictive accuracy as high as mine, then why wouldn’t they do what I did, and write a few hundred pages about their methodology before immediately using it to make a bunch of money? It would be a very impressive magic trick. However, apart from a few extremely rare and gifted authors like Nassim Nicholas Taleb, almost nobody else in the forecasting business had the balls to stake their reputation on a single prediction as publicly as me. So they can’t really have that good a track record, can they? After all, if even they don’t have enough faith in their own predictive accuracy enough to publicly lay their reputations on the line, then why should you believe in them?

If you’re this good at investing, why aren’t you working for a hedge fund?

Credentialism, narcissism, and anti-aspie bigotry. Hedge funds tend to value presentation very highly. This is understandable: they work with extremely wealthy clients who are used to people bending over backwards for the privilege of working with them. Therefore they like their portfolio managers to fulfill the three Ps: very presentable, polished, and PhDed. As somebody with mild Aspergers syndrome, these qualities are something I struggle greatly with. My results may be better than those of many fund managers, but I will always face discrimination from bigoted neurotypicals, especially in a tightly guarded field such as investment banking - where there are so many gatekeepers involved that style matters far more than substance, and the ability to give a persuasive presentation matters far more than actual results and deliverables.

Additionally, investment banking tends to be a profession with a lot of big egos, and these people don’t like being told bluntly that they’re wrong by somebody who doesn’t respect them. The fact is, most (but certainly not all) investment bankers tend to fit the classical stereotype of the egotistical narcissist who bullies anybody that doesn’t go along with their norms. CEOs may spout a lot of nonsense at TED talks and industry conferences about how they love having people on their teams who disagree with them because it helps them “reality-check their own beliefs,” but that’s mostly just self-delusional bullshit. The reality that these CEOs don’t state is that they love having people on their teams who disagree with them politely and respectfully. Aspies generally aren’t good at padding the harsh truth in ways that are flattering to these executives massive egos. Neurotypical bigots working in front-office banking roles don’t like my unpolished personality or the fact that I don’t respect their PhDs in economics, which I consider a useless pseudoscience, similar to astrology or phrenology. Can you blame them? It must be very upsetting for a well-groomed and articulate graduate of an expensive Ivy League university to know that a feral aspie who cusses a lot is far smarter and superior to them at doing something that they have practiced their entire lives to be good at. To be blunt, I rub a lot of these people the wrong way, especially since I’m not very humble about pointing out when they’re wrong and I’m right.

If you’re a better investor than the hedge funds, why don’t you just start your own hedge fund to compete against them?

Because the hedge funds have used shady lobbying practices to effectively make competition illegal. In order to become a licensed stockbroker, you need to pass the Series 7 exam to earn your license. You cannot take the Series 7 exam unless you have sponsorship with a licensed firm - in other words, you must already have the blessing of the big hedge funds in order to get the licensing you need to start a company that can compete with the big hedge funds. It’s a very Kafkaesque catch-22 for somebody like me. What do you think is the likelihood that I can secure sponsorship from one of these companies when my personal opinion is that most of the people in those companies are attractive faces in empty suits with useless degrees in pseudoscientific bullshit? That they’re basically con artists, deceiving people with money into thinking that their useless expertise is actually worth paying for? If I were a good actor who was able to conceal my contempt for evil narcissists like them, I might be able to pull it off. But as a non-neurotypical aspie, it’s almost impossible. This systemic discrimination against people like me - discrimination that the hedge funds have specifically lobbied for in order to prevent more talented people from going into business to compete against them - makes it impossible for me to go into business for myself in the field which I’m most skilled at, no matter how much better I am at achieving results than your average investment banker. Since my peaceful route to personal success has been blocked by narcissistic bigots, I’ve chosen to pursue much more aggressive paths towards my goals, dabbling in politics and religion to hurt the bigots whose corrupt lobbying and regulatory capture has interfered with my career trajectory. My plan is to disrupt the status quo until the status quo stops discriminating against people like me.

You mention in some of your previous blog posts that part of the reason you were so successful in the past three years is because you understood Covid was coming long before anybody else. If you knew the full impact of Covid, why didn’t you warn everybody? Why did you hint at it in your book but never say it outright?

Didn’t I just finish telling you about how I’ve been systematically discriminated against professionally my whole life due to bigoted neurotypicals? So why would I want to save you from Covid? Your society actively discriminates against aspies like me, while hypocritically claiming that I am the oppressor and should feel bad because of my “white male privilege.” That doesn’t make me feel very well-disposed towards society: in fact, it gives me a distinctly hostile vibe. Helping out people who bully me and hold me back is not at the top of my priority list, because if I rewarded you for treating people like me badly, you would continue doing it. However, if I could prove to you that I knew Covid was coming and made a huge profit in the stock market by deliberately allowing it to proliferate in order to get even with society for all their discrimination against aspies… well, then maybe the neurotypicals would have to deeply examine whether their societal bigotry against aspies was worth the high death toll it resulted in. People are OK laughing at aspies and other neurodivergent people when there are no consequences for teasing us, but when five million people die because one of the aspies they bullied decides to get revenge by “accidentally” forgetting to warn them about a easily preventable pandemic, they tend to stop laughing and reevaluate their behavior. To me, Covid is basically God’s way of punishing you neurotypicals for your bigoted intolerance against my kind. Why would I want to interfere with Darwinian social selection when it’s helping me achieve my goals?

In other words, hinting obliquely about Covid in my book in a way that you wouldn’t understand (until it was much too late) allowed me to take the credit for predicting it while at the same time ensuring that you wouldn’t recognize my warning in time to avoid mass casualties. My main concern wasn’t saving your lives; it was ending your discrimination against people like me. I’m not legally obligated to use my superforecasting science to warn you about disasters. If you want me to care about you, then you need to start caring about me. Only delusional narcissists would expect somebody whom they had treated badly to care about their survival. With regards to Covid, I saw it coming and took all the steps I needed to advance my goals, which do not necessarily align with what other people want my goals to be. To be quite blunt, society has badly mistreated me, so I’m not interested in using my skillset to benefit society unless doing so helps me get to where I want to go.

Aren’t you worried that people will hate you for cashing in on mass death?

Why would I be worried about the opinions of evil bigoted garbage who refuse to take accountability for their discrimination against people like me? That would be like a black man worrying about the opinions of the KKK. In life, there’s always some people whose good side you’re never going to get on no matter how hard you try, so instead of trying to please everybody, focus on hurting the people whom you can’t please. If you do this long enough and consistently enough, eventually those people will stop expecting you to please them and will start being more concerned about whether they are pleasing you.

When society stops discriminating against neurodiverse people like me and starts treating us as equals - valuing our unique skillsets instead of silencing or “deplatforming” us - then I’ll worry about the opinions of society. Until then, everyone who has a problem with me can go fuck themselves. Superforecasting and memetics both have a lot of potential military and intelligence applications, and if there are no buyers locally who believe in and are willing to pay for this scientific methodology I developed (which is extremely easy to weaponize), I would be happy to emigrate to another country that does not discriminate against aspies like the United States does.

What are your next steps?

A lot of my critics say that memetics and superforecasting are not real. To this, my response is “Well, if they’re not real, then surely you’re OK with me using them to hurt you, right? After all, if the science of how to quickly spread an ideology is completely made up, then surely there is no harm in me continuing to use it to undermine the status quo? Me using a made-up science to eliminate the special interest groups that oppose me is every bit as legal and acceptable as a Wicca practitioner using witchcraft to curse her enemies. If something doesn’t officially exist and has no measurable impact outside my own imagination, then it’s perfectly legal for me to use my made-up science/religion in whatever ways I want.” And if my critics counter that memetics and superforecasting are real and that I should be using them for constructive purposes rather than destructive ones, then I would say “Sure, no problem - but first, where’s my Nobel prize for proving the existence of two new sciences to accomplish quantifiable real-world objectives? If society wants me to be helpful, then society ought to stop discriminating against me first - and the fact that I’m not being given the credit I deserve for a phenomenal accomplishment just because you normies find me ‘unlikable’ or ‘tactless’ proves my thesis about the discrimination against aspies. I have no desire to be ‘constructive’ or ‘helpful’ in any way towards a society that treats me like a second-class citizen. In fact, I plan to be very destructive towards the institutional interests whose bigotry and lobbying have interfered with my career trajectory." Basically, I plan to use the sciences that my critics claim are "imaginary” to cause all sorts of non-imaginary problems until my critics are forced to admit that my sciences are very real. It’s very easy to disbelieve in something when it’s not directly impacting you, but its much harder to disbelieve in something when your disbelief might have a direct negative impact on your personal well-being.

When I first started writing this blog, I had about 20 new readers a month. In less than half a year, my readership has grown to over 1000 new readers a month. That is very much in line with how memes work. They grow exponentially quickly by leveraging key commonalities in people’s thought processes and worldview. So I plan to continue spreading my paradigm and my views of society to punish all the anti-aspie bigots and haters out there, until my grievances are addressed: until our inbred elites and hereditary management class stop discriminating against and persecuting neurodivergent people for the crime of being smarter and more outspoken than themselves.

In terms of my growth track, I already have a book published about these techniques and methodologies, and I hope to continue preaching my truth until my book becomes more popular and more people start to become aware of the corrupt lobbying practices and discriminatory behavior that Wall Street practices against people like me - people who want to challenge their anti-competitive practices and overthrow their parasitic dominance over our financial system. Average people need to know about the ways that our corrupt elites have stacked the deck against them, and my story of adversity serves as the perfect example of how these evil bigots persecute and harass anybody who points out their shortcomings, even while their own selfish narcissism and unwillingness to accept blame inflicts a crippling death toll on society at large.

I realize that this post started out as a quantifiable analysis of my superforecasting results, and probably ended up unpacking just a bit more about my psyche than I intended. But hey, in a world this fake and full of bullshit, don’t most readers appreciate a little unexpected honesty? Besides, in many ways, the why of a story is often just as important as the how.