Real-Life Angel Investing Returns 2012–2016

But in fact that author is going about this all wrong. It doesn't really matter if VC outperforms. The point of VC or hedge funds or any other alternative investments isn't to outperform the market on a risk adjusted basis (though that would be nice), but to provide a uncorrelated return stream.

When these uncorrelated or less correlated return streams is mixed into the standard market return stream, the risk adjusted return of the entire portfolio is enhanced. This is why you shouldn't focus on the individual risk/return profile of an asset or investment, but instead focus on the entire portfolio.

A great example of this somewhat counterintuitive statistical phenomenon is gold. Gold historically has had both high volatility and low returns. However, due to the low correlation to the market, mixing in gold to a SPY portfolio and performing a minimum variance optimization to determine the weights actually boosts the return/risk profile.

If anyone is interested, I have a blog post about it: https://cryptm.org/posts/2020/07/09/alt.html

The figures assumed to be right, this demonstrates that with knowledge and skill you can drive to a very satisfactory outcome. 2013 to present is a 7 year investment timeline, and on a sustained normal investment return scale you'd expect it to be double-and-a-bit, he went to arguing 6x so he's ahead of the market.

But, thats also arguably a non-sustainable ROI longterm. Not that it doesn't happen, but that the luxury of being able to retain the risk side, for the large multiplier, is confined to a lucky few.

This is about the latent value of early-stage ideas, as opposed to the sustained value of enterprise which continues in role and is not game-changer forever (what is?) but becomes an industry: the Angel is not talking about industrial continued value, but about that initial rise of the curve.

And, since the angel can swoop away, they can confirm their inner sense by denying capital injection at the point it might have rescued things, to focus on something else: So in effect there is no neutral arbiter "was it right" -It simply is what it is.