After two years of research, you have developed a trading strategy that, compared to the S&P 500, "has underperformed, especially the way the market has been"? If your strategy depends on buying / selling it will trigger taxes each time this happens, yes? Short term gains taxes? When people switch from sp500 to your strategy how much less will then earn over a decade? Yet you claim your strategy "works"?
> The expected performance of the strategy is somewhere between 10% and 30%, but it is not clear what exactly.
If a profitable pattern exists, what makes you think nobody else has found it and that it will continue to exist in the future? Is it because few look for these profitable patterns? Are they poorly funded? Do they lack incentives to do it?
> I don't think it's necessarily fair to call others "dumb money". They can hold for longer and still profit with the market.
"Dumb money" refers to hobby traders who believe stock trading will make them rich. Some rely on gut feelings, while others use advice from astrology or technical analysis. Why do you suppose professional traders pay for order flow from such traders?
> The market is not a zero sum game because the market capitalization is several multiples of the total invested funds. The market is a money printer in its own way.
For every trade, there is a counterparty on the other side, and your gain is their loss and vice versa. This makes trading a zero-sum activity. Furthermore, for every trade, there are middlemen who charge fees, making trading a negative-sum activity.
Long-term buying and holding is positive-sum investing and does not require a trading strategy or searching for profitable patterns.
> Precious metals as a currency do not work because the government doesn't have the freedom to mint an unlimited supply of hard assets.
The purpose of a currency is to facilitate transactions and maintain stable prices in the short term while losing value in the long term to discourage hoarding. Gold cannot achieve this because the amount of gold cannot be adjusted to match the size of the economy as it grows or shrinks. When the economy grows, using gold as money will cause it to stall because people will save up gold as it becomes more valuable instead of spending it. Deflationary currencies like gold are detrimental to economic growth, which is why modern countries no longer use them.
> The government holds a gun to people's heads, locking them up if they don't use the highly inflationary national currencies.
Are you surprised by inflation? Saving your wealth using a currency does not make sense since it is designed to lose value over time.
If you prefer precious metals, what prevents you from keeping your wealth in gold (a negative-sum asset) and converting it to fiat currency only when needed?
> Countries are run by politicians, bureaucrats, and armed police mafia who care about their paycheck and pensions which wouldn't be so big if not for free moneyprinting at the expense of the citizenry. The people do not have freedom of their choice of money.
Countries are "owned" by their voters. Government debts are your debts. Inflation is just another tax like other taxes. If you are dissatisfied with the current situation, get involved to change it.
