I'm sure you're being downvoted for going against orthodoxy by suggesting that one can "beat the market". I agree with you in that it can be done, and should not be attempted by most people (I personally would not put intelligence constraints on it; I think it's a factor of one's tolerance for looking at financial data, and an ability to keep emotion out of trading decisions). I don't try to time the market, however. My prime directive is to preserve capital, which I implement mostly through stops. I'm happy to leave money on the table, but I don't want to lose money.
But let's look at the fund in question: how did they stay funded? The same way a lot of bad funds stay funded: people put money in and never look at it again. And those people are not the ones updating stop limits, looking at charts, and basically making a hobby of their finances. Those people should be buying index funds. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. With the time I've spend reading books, tracking markets, etc., I could have learned a language, started a business, build my own house, whatever. Because after looking at returns over the last twenty years, yeah, I have demonstrated I can consistently beat the market (or more likely, can leverage opportunities of sheer luck), but not by enough to make the opportunity cost worth it if I didn't actually like doing it as a hobby.
And folks should completely ignore your point #4, especially the part about buying a house "tax-free". Eh, not quite.
I agree that it isn't really tax free since you got to pay it back eventually, but because mortgages generally require some minimum amount down (at least here in Canada) it's a real consideration for many people, though it does come at a cost later if you're going up tax brackets.
I also agree that it isn't just intelligence, but I do think you can't do much if you aren't at least in the top 5%, even with a whole hell of a lot of training. Much of investing is a zero sum game, and it's extremely competitive.
I also agree that most people should do broad basket, diversified ETFs and I also think your stop-loss strategy is above average, but I think you could probably do better if you were willing to take more risks on individual companies / technologies.
As for returns, I agree that it doesn't look good on paper for the first 20 years, but the difference compounds and building experience matters. I'm now at the point where I'm both better at it and I have more at my disposal to grow. Last time I checked, not counting crytpo-currencies, I'm averaging around 18% per year pre-inflation across a mix of bonds, stocks, and funds. Now, much of that has been a combination of timing / luck on currencies. So let's call it 15% to be safe. Doubling every 5 years, I'm 32 and I started this at around 15. I put maybe 200 hours into it a year and the family portfolio not counting housing or shares in hard-to-sell startups is almost $1m. Another 40 years of this is going to really make all this effort worth it, provided we don't have something catastrophic like a world war / economic collapse.
On getting downvoted:
I don't let it bother me. I try to remember that sometimes I see things I know are factually wrong get upvoted and that sometimes I'm getting upvoted despite being wrong. The votes aren't the truth, even if they do correlate.
Maybe we need more webs-of-trust on social networks that should influence how votes are counted. Because if you just judge thing by the words on their own, somethings can sound wrong or crazy at first blush even if they are right. For example, Facebook's Instagram acquisition was seen as dumb, but it was genius. Although maybe this idea is wrong. Maybe we already overweigh the opinions of the connected and powerful.
But let's look at the fund in question: how did they stay funded? The same way a lot of bad funds stay funded: people put money in and never look at it again. And those people are not the ones updating stop limits, looking at charts, and basically making a hobby of their finances. Those people should be buying index funds. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. With the time I've spend reading books, tracking markets, etc., I could have learned a language, started a business, build my own house, whatever. Because after looking at returns over the last twenty years, yeah, I have demonstrated I can consistently beat the market (or more likely, can leverage opportunities of sheer luck), but not by enough to make the opportunity cost worth it if I didn't actually like doing it as a hobby.
And folks should completely ignore your point #4, especially the part about buying a house "tax-free". Eh, not quite.