It seems to me whether that is good depends on what you conceive of as counterfactuals. If you truly believe that the investments would have made you a zillion dollars in a worst case scenario for the economy, then the fact that they've made almost nothing when the market has gone up & up & up doesn't seem that bad.
This fund's performance is objectively bad because there are alternatives with less risk that provide much better returns for much lower fees. Also, since the markets, long term, generally go up, investing in something that expects the opposite is foolish.
You can't judge risk by outcomes, so I don't think it can ever be quantified objectively. Risk always depends on what you know and what you don't know and what you think might have happened if things were different.
What was the risk of Trump winning the election? Some people think that after it happened, the odds are retroactively 100%. I think that the odds were probably about 30%, since that's what polling implied on the eve of the election. But then one may argue that we know things we didn't know then, that it might have been rigged and therefore the probability was higher than 30%.
If you imagine repeating anything 1000 times, to find out the odds of an outcome, you have to decide what you are holding the same and what you are not. If you hold nothing the same, it makes no sense to compare. If you hold everything the same, you trivially expect the exact same outcome.
I think the fact that you can spin different stories about what risks were actually taken is why investing, and life in general, is hard to optimize.
Your probabilities for anything after an event depend on your probabilities assumed prior.
