An algorithm could be anything, right? Maybe they analyzed the middle school report cards of executives and majority shareholders, and tied that to value over time in a way that the S&P 500 did. Maybe there's some telling data point that people have never looked at before.
I agree that predicting future price based on the current price has likely been tried to death by billions of hedge funds, but who knows, maybe they found something new that nobody has ever noticed. And, you can come up with the best stock trading algorithm in history and still not have the capital necessary to execute it, so it's possible that portfolio results don't matter.
I'm not saying anything is likely here, merely that we have nowhere near enough data to even speculate or offer advice.
> Maybe they analyzed the middle school report cards of executives and majority shareholders, and tied that to value over time in a way that the S&P 500 did.
You are talking about ad-hoc signals here. Of course there are a lot of them that beat the benchmark, it's the basis of active management.
But we're not talking about any signal here, we're talking about "value" - a signal so well known, studied and persistent we call it a "factor", and often decompose beta/sector/country adjusted residual returns _just_ based on a set of 4/5 of these factors.
I agree that predicting future price based on the current price has likely been tried to death by billions of hedge funds, but who knows, maybe they found something new that nobody has ever noticed. And, you can come up with the best stock trading algorithm in history and still not have the capital necessary to execute it, so it's possible that portfolio results don't matter.
I'm not saying anything is likely here, merely that we have nowhere near enough data to even speculate or offer advice.