Do you feel that your approach beats a common benchmark over a ten year period?

Empirically I have outperformed over the past two decades. But lets qualify that the backdrop market environment matters. If the market surges straight up 12-18% a year for years on end I will tend to drag. As a value oriented investor I get less interested when valuations are higher which admittedly can cause underperformance if momentum keeps pushing things up. You can't get off the train too early. I saw too many of my peers think the bull ride was over in 2012/2013 because they got too anchored to post-crisis valuations and failed to see normalized valuations as appropriate.

When the market churns flat I tend to outperform because I have a sizable yield component and my individual name alpha shows its strength. When the market crashed in 2008 I ended up the year on short positions so that really impacts longer run outperformance. In December I went on a shopping spree after being defensively positioned into it which left me much better off than if I had passively been long the whole time.

My point is that no one strategy fits all investing risk thresholds or environments. I like to aim for a nice 7-12%/yr with minimal drawdown volatility and hedges against nasty things happening. I look "stupid" if the market is up 20% in a given year and I am not. Over the longer term nasty things seem to happen every X years which has vindicated the approach thus far.