Not sure if this is a good way to look at it. On the 5 year graph, it is notable that from 2017-2020 there is a clear period of underperformance.

I think it's very informative.
I like the 3 year a bit better for information content, but whatever.

What would be interesting as an overlay:
An equally weighted portfolio of the universe of qualifying dividend payers that the YEY portfolio was using.
I mention this because the vast underperformance of YEY for a while was in large part because of the vast underperofrmance of all decent dividend payers in general during that stretch.
From (say) Dec 2010 to April 2020, the S&P was up 164% and an equally weighted portfolio of VL stocks that YEY might pick (top half of dividend payers by yield) returned 77%.
The steps in the screen other than "look for a decent dividend" really had their work cut out for them, starting from a 4.7%/year handicap.
As a generalization, all dividend screens did very poorly for a few years, simply because all dividend paying stocks did pretty poorly. The screens were picking from a bag of laggards.

Ramblings on the same general subject---

Sometimes I look at stock performance broken into three categories:
* Non dividend payers
* Dividend payers, the lower half by yield
* Dividend payers, the upper half by yield

Among other things, the very recent relative performance of the portfolios (rank order) can be used as an input to a not-bad market timing signal.
Ties back to Zeelotes' aggressive/defensive signal family.

Jim