The Best Suboptimal Strategy

being able to execute your plan or strategy is more important than find a perfect strategy because most of the time people are terrible at following their plan.  

“a suboptimal strategy that you can execute is better than an optimal strategy you can’t execute.”

A decent sub optimal strategy is to just own the market over any 7 year period.  The dividend adjusted nominal SP500 return has been positive over basically every 7 year period

http://www.simplestockinvesting.com/SP500-historical-real-total-returns.htm

However, inflation adjusted returns have a few 7 year periods that under performed.  The main question to consider in your sub optimal portfolio is how cheap or expensive the market is compared to 5 year T-notes. About 90% of the time markets will outperform the notes.  If you're young put every dollar that you don't need into the SP500 unless the market is in the upper 2nd standard deviation of DCF using Sp500 expected earnings compared to 5 year T-notes.