With a flair that would make a three-card monte player blush, Mr. Seides somehow takes apart, makes a few "adjustments" and then reassembles the pieces of his bet and finds... a tie! If only we all could have Mr. Seides's magic wand of "adjusting for the impact of this investing environment" to clean up what are politely called massive screwups, and less politely known in more colorful terms. My goodness, it's as if a mediocre baseball player undertook to show you how his singles and doubles should actually be home runs (if you just made adjustments for wind currents, curvatures of stadiums, an unprecedented number of talented pitchers) and, as a result, ties him with Barry Bonds's home-run record. And then, just to show you there are no hard feelings, let's you know that it's not worth quibbling over messy past calculations, since what matters is next year! Time to play ball!

Mr. Seides' likes to remind us that no one can know the future, just in case you may have thought that the highly compensated "best and brightest" he knows do have some crystal ball. He then runs through several items that seemed so unusual and could never be accounted for in advance -- zero-bound interest rates, S&P 500 outperforming global markets, added costs in shorting stocks, etc. Yes, the world is messy and chaotic, and hits us with unprecedented events. Is that news to anyone? Should that be a surprise? As Mr. Seides should appreciate, the future ain't what it used to be. Unpredicted outcomes and events are not a free pass to adjust returns, massage numbers, and claim you're just smoothing out the curve.

One thing we do know (with all due respect, Mr. Seides) is that the next seven years will hit us with massive, unanticipated events, some of which may make the past seven years look mild by comparison. The next several years could have regional wars, natural resource shortages, massive cybersecurity breakdowns, and who knows what else. Does that allow anyone then to make a similar claim as Mr. Seides and insist that these singular events once more mitigate any incorrect assumptions?

I have a suspicion that one sure thing over the coming decade will be hedge fund managers telling us why their fund performance is not nearly as poor as you think once they "adjust for the impact of this investment environment." Plus ca change.