His approach to this - the goal of beating the market - has been totally wrong. It sounds as if he's been at this completely solo - he mentions in the comments

His approach to this - the goal of beating the market - has been totally wrong. It sounds as if he's been at this completely solo - he mentions in the comments that he worked alone as he didn't want to share his algorithms. He would have benefitted enormously from working in an institution that specialises in this kind of work (hedge funds etc). Being largely self-taught and having worked alone since he was 17 pretty much guarantees he doesn't know anything institutional trading firms won't know or have studied - employing as they do advanced mathematicians, physicists etc to work at the cutting edge of algo research and trading. Not only has he missed out academically, he's missed out operationally. "Playing-the-game" is as big a part - if not bigger part - of trading than pricing/valuation. With the resources of a large institution you can learn to play the market in a way you can't possibly by yourself. This is in fact largely how they make money - consistently, year on year. Thirdly - even if he did discover a pricing inconsistency or whatever, it's doubtful he'd be able to leverage it in as profitable a way that he would be able to as a firm.