You've got to think about more than just whether you're beating the S&P500 ETF at any given time. The point of the S&P 500 is that when a recession comes you're protected. The point is that the S&P500 is a diverse portfolio of companies so that whilst it will be affected by a recession you aren't going to be over-exposed to the companies that are hit the worst. I suspect it's quite difficult for you to reproduce that kind of diversity in your portfolio manually. It's also very difficult for you to put a value on that risk - you've outperformed by a couple percentage points. But you're probably overexposed to some extent, those two things have value - but there's a reason why hedge funds spend millions of quants and still lose out to the market in the long run.