How many of you have actually calculated your returns against the S&P, properly, and how many are just assuming you're beating it because your portfolio is green?

I've been picking individual stocks alongside an index core for a couple of years now and if you asked me at a party I'd tell you I'm outperforming, but last month I actually sat down and ran the numbers the way you're supposed to, time-weighted, adjusted for every deposit and withdrawal, after taxes on realized gains, and accounting for the cash drag from money sitting in my brokerage earning basically nothing while I waited for the right entry point. That idle cash was sometimes 15 to 20% of my active allocation for months at a time and I never mentally counted it as part of my stock-picking performance, but it is. The result is that my active sleeve returned roughly 11.2% annualized over the years, SPY did 10.8% over the same period, so I "beat" the index by about 40 basis points before I factor in short-term capital gains taxes which wipes out the gap entirely. After tax I'm probably behind by 30 to 50bps and that's before I put any value on the hundreds of hours I spent reading 10-Ks and watching earnings calls.

I don't think I'm uniquely bad at this, I just think most retail stock pickers are in a similar spot and just haven't done the math honestly. The positions you remember are the ones that doubled, the ones you quietly sold at a loss or held through a 40% drawdown somehow don't factor into the narrative you tell yourself, and survivorship bias in your own portfolio is a real thing. So for the active investors here, have you actually run this calculation?