Comment by extraextra

You're doing amazing then, good for you!

Regarding the stock picking experiment, yes, there have been many similar experiments. The premise is just pick a random basket of stocks and see how it performs over decades. Indeed those have outperformed cap-weighted the indexes, most of the time.

How? If you pick a random basket of stocks, you'll end up with mostly small-cap stocks. Cap-weighted indexes are heavily driven by a few large stocks. Most years, small-cap outperforms large-cap (Fama-French 5-factor model[1]). So the "monkey picks stocks" experiment is actually just an exercise in harvesting what is called the "size premium".

Since the AI boom, large-cap has been significantly outperforming small-cap, so if you run the same "monkey picks stocks" experiment, it would likely underperform most of the time.

If you want to easily visualize this, just go on TradingView and compare SPY (cap-weighted S&500) with RSP (equal-weighted S&P500).

[1] https://www.quantt.co.uk/resources/fama-french-model-explain...