I imagine a fair bit of that has to do with a rotation from growth to value in the wider market.  The sort of companies which did best in the Strawman index when it was flying have tended to be smaller companies that had huge potential but little in the way of profits in many cases.  Those companies tend to get overbought and overpriced during those "growth frenzy" periods in the market and they come back to earth when the hype wears off. 

An example is 3DP (Pointerra), a company that is still the largest position in the Strawman index, whose share price has halved since mid-Feb this year and is firmly heading down.  They still have value, however the market is attributing more sensible valuations to many of these companies today than it was two years ago.  In my opinion.  There are also a couple of companies, such as Pushpay (PPH) which were very popular here that have NOT lived up to their hype at all. 

PPH has had the founders and major shareholders leave/sell out, they've had senior executives leave (CEO in 2019, CFO this year), and they appear to have run out of "Mega-Churches" to target and have moved down the food chain to smaller organisations with less potential revenue.  I don't want to get into a discussion about the merits of either company.  I have not held 3DP or PPH in RL or in Strawman.com, because I thought they were overhyped, and the potential was being overestimated here, however I'm simply trying to present what I think is the predominant market view here, i.e. why their share prices have gone down and both appear to still be in downtrends.  And they're not alone. 

Envirosuite (EVS) is another that has been in the Strawman index for a while, probably since inception, and one I do hold both here and in RL, although I unfortunately bought them at significantly higher levels than where they are today.  EVS could fall into the same category as the other two - too much promise, not enough delivered.  However my own view is that the investment thesis is just taking longer to play out than expected with EVS and the market got impatient and many punters have simply sold out and moved on.  I believe the recent capital raise at 8.5 cps was a major catalyst for a wash-out with EVS, and it coincided with end-of-FY tax-loss selling as well.  At 12.5 cps, EVS is actually up +39% since their 30th June low of 9 cps, however they are still a long way below that 35.6 cps level they reached at the end of September 2019.

There are plenty of other examples, however if you look at the best performing ASX200 stocks of the past 2 years, many of them have been larger companies that are not in the Strawman index, such as the big banks.  The S&P/ASX 200 Financials Ex-A-REIT Index (XXJ) was up +35.69% in FY21, and it's risen another +1.6% since June 30.  That index (Financials) - now at 7373 - is actually up +80% since its 4081 Covid-low on 23-Mar-2020, and it contains the biggest companies on the ASX.  Financials is also the biggest sector in the S&P ASX 200, representing over 30% of the entire index (currently 30.3%), and the next largest sector is Materials, being another 18.3% of the index.  That sector includes Australia's mega-miners BHP (A$153.5 billion market cap), Rio Tinto (A$48.3 billion) and FMG (A$71 billion), as well as the entire gold mining sector, starting with Newcrest (NCM, A$21.3 billion) and Northern Star (NST, $11.6 billion market capitalisation).

The Financials and Materials sectors combined account for almost half of the ASX 200 index (currently 48.6%).  The biggest constituents of those sectors and of the index in total are very different companies in every respect to those held by the Strawman index.  I think the first year to 18 months of the Strawman index was a golden period for smaller SaaS companies and tech start-ups, with everybody looking for the next WAAAX company, and that is no longer the case.

My own view is that there are plenty of companies in the Strawman index that will do very well from here, but that many of them are currently trading at much more sensible valuations than where they were in 2019 or early 2020 (before Covid). 

One thing that a crash does - such as the March 2020 Covid-panic-induced crash - is remind investors that companies that are priced mostly on potential rather than fundamentals are usually hit much harder in a correction or crash, and can often take longer to recover as well.  It is generally the larger companies that have a consistent record of profitable operation that fall the least and recover the quickest.  It helps that many of those were less likely to be over-hyped and/or way-overpriced prior to the correction or crash, so there was less to "corrrect".  It is commonly known that people feel a sense of loss far more intensely than they feel when they have a proportionate gain, even a paper loss or paper gain, so losses tend to form stronger memories and change investor behaviour more than gains do.  I would suggest that March 2020 has scared a significant proportion of investors away from the sort of companies that provided most of the early gains for the Strawman index.

However - it is what it is.  I think the main value is in the significant contributions of individual members which provide valuable insights that we would not get without access to this site.  I never thought that the outperformance of the Strawman index was sustainable, purely because the index was so growth orientated and growth is not always in vogue.  "Value" plays have never featured in the index, so when the wider market rotates towards value, a growth orientated portfolio (or index) is very likely to underperform the wider market.  Just my 2c.