Personal Capital can only claim to have beat the market in the backwards-tested hypothetical sense. Hindsight is a wonderful thing that way. What hasn't been proven by their way of doing business is if they can do just as well when times are tough. The sales pitch I got from them earlier this year is that their system is more designed for weathering the bad days than it is beating the market during the good ones. I'll have to dig up the presentation they sent me, but I don't believe their fancy graph included the last couple years. It may have only gone up to 2011. Their margin between returns and fees compared to the market is practically a wash (assuming their modeling is accurate).
