I could have flipped a coin, gone long or short at beginning of this year.
I would have had a 50% chance of outperforming the market by 40% this year (given it is down roughly 20%).
You seem to underestimate the level of effort and rigor required to achieve this level of capital allocation. In contrast, beating the market by 20% is table stakes. Folks in the industry do it all the time; the difference here simply is that I built an ML-powered engine to do it systematically.
The strategy has a 18% correlation to SPY, so "beating the market" is the wrong benchmark. The proper reference point is probably 0, when correlation is that low it shouldn't matter much whether the market's up or down.
The strategy had 14% return and .82 Sharpe ratio, so 17% vol. That's bad. With large asset levels and a long track record a Sharpe of 1 might be OK, for 1 year with minimal assets a Sharpe less than 2 isn't necessarily that impressive.
Another huge issue: this strategy was run with less than $1mm. It would certainly perform worse at higher asset levels as market impact becomes meaningful, the only question is how much worse.
Finally, results matter, but fund raising is primarily a sales process. Investors aren't just looking for the highest numbers. They're going to evaluate the people and processes involved, the risk management philosophy, really every aspect of the business. OP has some professional finance experience but it doesn't sound like he has the connections or reputation that would help with fund raising. If his sales pitch was anything like this article I don't think most institutional investors would be impressed (EG, minimal references to risk management, frequent comparisons to SPY performance when that's not an appropriate benchmark.)
This seems extremely hard to believe. You should be running a multi-billion $ Quant fund if this is the case. The idea that you would try to push this as a newsletter rather than just taking investor money and becoming a billionaire literally makes the story seem farcical.