With the volatility that I have admitted to, I think we can still say my returns really boil down to luck.
If you took $1700 right now and bought October $80 calls on Gilead for $0.03, expiring this Friday and then news comes out tomorrow that Gilead is going to merge with Merck, or split up into two companies, or anything else that drives the price up 15%, you would turn the $1700 into $226,000. In one or two days. Now you take the money and invest for the next 14 years relatively safely, in several blue chip stocks across different industries.
You can then say your average annual return is 38% or whatever it works out to be, when in reality you made some really big lucky trades.
I think this is what I am trying to say happened. I have traded this account for 15 years but had some lucky breaks which overcame some big losses. Nobody would want to risk serious money doing things this way. Who would want to be down 80%, even for just a year? It sucks.