What's more impressive performance, big sudden gains, or a long track record of beating the market?

I noticed something recently. When I see people posting about making hundreds of percentage point gains on the normal YOLO-subs, it really doesn't impress me or raise feelings of envy at all, but it probably would have when I was young. If you get sudden gains, it was either based on luck or inside information. I remember Howard Marks roughly stating that over a long period of time, the top performing investors were basically never in the top 5% for any given year. (This may not be the exact mat