The Test Bench › famous_system

Does The '91% Beat the Market' Screen actually work?

OVERSOLD

Works, but nothing like as well as it is sold.

The claim

Our stock screen beat the S&P 500 about 91% of the time — A famous investing club

What we did

Tested against Buy & hold SPY / honest reconstruction.

The result

Result: Claimed ~91% beat-rate; honest (net of cost, survivorship-free) ~32%

Claimed ~91% beat-rate; honest (net of cost, survivorship-free) ~32%

Verdict

Real but oversold. Strip the survivorship bias and pay real trading costs and the edge is about a third of the brochure. Still positive — just nowhere near the marketing.

What the test did and did not do

survivorship-free universe
net of real costs
point-in-time data
checked for look-ahead
tested out of sample

Almost nobody publishing a backtest says which of these they did. We list the ones we failed as well as the ones we passed.

Tested 2026-06-23. The same treatment, applied to every other system, is on the test bench.

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Written with AI assistance from our own test database. The numbers are computed, not composed.
General market commentary for education, not personalised investment advice. Backtested results are hypothetical. Trading carries a real risk of loss.