> Maybe they analyzed the middle school report cards of executives and majority shareholders, and tied that to value over time in a way that the S&P 500 did. Y

> Maybe they analyzed the middle school report cards of executives and majority shareholders, and tied that to value over time in a way that the S&P 500 did. You are talking about ad-hoc signals here. Of course there are a lot of them that beat the benchmark, it's the basis of active management. But we're not talking about any signal here, we're talking about "value" - a signal so well known, studied and persistent we call it a "factor", and often decompose beta/sector/country adjusted residual returns _just_ based on a set of 4/5 of these factors.