[Sniper]

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I will bet I am ahead after any time frame longer than 6 months.

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How much are you willing to bet???

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Would Marketocracy be good for this? i.e. - do they track trading costs? Are trades executed in real time? Sure they don't use delayed quotes.

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Marketocracy is a good site to track this, even though small portfolios (<20 stock) will not qualify under the compliance rules for ranking there, they will still be tracked.

In fact, Marketocracy is an excellent site to see some serious outperformance!!!

My marketocracy port, with over 100 stocks and almost no attention from me, has beaten the S&P500 by roughly 1%/month on average over the last 5 years!!!

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You will also have to factor in taxes (short term cap gains, dividend taxes, etc) from your winning trades and deduct your losing trades. We can assume 15% on dividends and LT Cap gains, 25% on short term cap gains.


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Active Investing is not the same as Active Trading, and considering the time frame you are proposing, the tax impact will be similar for someone buying and holding a few select stocks, as the tax implications of owning an index tracker.

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My actual argument is that indexing beats active management, but since I believe equity performance is a function of asset class and not some super-duper analysis by you genius stock pickers, this is the only way to decide who is right (but I am open to other ideas).

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By definition, indexing only provides AVERAGE performance, and in the case of market cap weighted indexes, not even a great measure of average. Because of this, the simplest and easiest way to beat the average is to select stocks with higher than average growth rates and smaller than average market caps from within the index.


Finally, it is worth noting that even the process of selecting appropriate indexes to invest in, is Active management of your investments!