Lol no . If someone actually knew how to outperform the market even by a half percent , they sure as hell wouldn ' t need wouldn ' t feel inclined to write books about it . Instead , they ' d collect billions in investment from all the hungry alphastarved corps out there health insurance pensions etc . . Fact is , all the nonhi freq funds medium to long horizon have tanked since 2008 . Save your money . Don ' t drink the Koolaid . There is no alpha for private investors . There never has been . And you can learn that from something as straightforward as BlackScholesMerton . But what do I know , just a measly Phd in Finance Machine Learning EDIT I ' ve seen from your other post you trade a bit . Perhaps you ' ve made some money . However , so do people at the Blackjack table , occasionally . If you consider the emotional bias you ' re under since it ' s your money , the fact that you have a single time series probably spanning less than 10 years , I would find it extremely improbable that your returns time series is statistically significantly larger than the market ' s series as in , significant pvalue at the 99 % level . If yes , prove me wrong , and more importantly write a paper if you did indeed , that should get published in no time at all . Otherwise , happy to hear you were lucky , but that ' s in all likelihood all that happened . Happy investing !