I am currently re-testing the same virus sample every day at VirusTotal to see which antivirus products detect it. Two hours after I received the sample, the detection rate was 0 out of 50. It is now about five days old and the detection rate is up to 15/50 last I checked:
https://www.virustotal.com/en/file/...21e1e4edcf80eb6d20b553cb4a469305431/analysis/ On any given day, any of the top vendors can miss the virus that steals your stuff. Deleting the virus five days later won't get your stuff back.
This is not a surprise to me, and if I were going to choose an antivirus product as the main line of defense, I would be looking for strong behavioral-detection performance. For a power user, however, I suggest using application whitelisting (such as
Software Restriction Policy or at least Family Safety) combined with
Microsoft EMET. Use a browser that has sandboxing technology (IE's Protected Mode or Chrome's sandboxing). Also uninstall unnecessary software, disable Java in your browsers (or uninstall Java completely if you don't need it),
disable AutoPlay completely, and use
Secunia PSI to check the rest of your software for missing security patches.