Thank you for this. I never have understood why anybody would apply what appeared to be true about developing proficiency on the violin to trading. Then there's the survivorship bias from beginning to end. It's not unlike the business of 95% (now 99%, sometimes 99.9%) of traders failing, when it's actually more like 60%, though even this figure is misleading since so many of these simply break even. But the 95% figure has made the transition into the realm of accepted fact, so why argue about it, particularly when it's irrelevant to one's own success?
I'm not following you here, unless you meant to type, "I never have understood why anybody would NOT apply what appeared to be true about developing proficiency on the violin to trading." FWIW, I am a Juilliard-trained violinist as well as a self-taught trader.
I prefer: " Neo, sooner or later you're going to realize just as I did that there's a difference between knowing the path and walking the path" Morpheus
"All had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age eight, practice times began to diverge. By age 20, the elite performers had averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only done 4,000 hours of practice." This part is subtle but very important in my opinion: ----> By age 20 I think that the earlier in life you get your 10,000 hours in, the better. That's why the guy in the article trying to be an expert golfer really has no advantage against people like Tiger Woods who probably got his 10,000 hours of practice in before the age of 15. There's just something more productive about learning and practicing things at a young age than trying to start from scratch later in life.
I watched guys day-trade and kick butt in the late 90's. By 2002 they were all breaking even or losing. They didn't get old and stupid in that time; the market changed, as it always does. Ten thousand hours is a long time in this business.
Heck, everybody was kicking butt in the late Nineties. Remember the Beardstown Ladies? "A bull market makes geniuses of us all." Your daytraders were mediocrities with delusions of grandeur, hence their failures when the bulls stopped running. Real traders make money in all types of markets, or at least stop losing in markets their strats aren't designed to exploit.
The market structure changed. By 2001 I saw the writing on the wall and looked at my options: (a) go back into the workforce; (b) join a prop firm and retool; or (c) transition to futures. I chose (c) and it was very rough. Had I not had the reserves to reload (more than once), I would have been forced to quit. Relative to the 10,000 hours theme of this thread, the money gave me more time, but the quality of the hours spent is more important than the quantity. It's like the club player in chess who has been at the game for 30 years, yet has never surpassed mid-1900. I like to use the chess analogy because of the accurate statistics that are used. A mid-1900 rating puts him in the 95th percentile of USCF rated players. To any guy off the street, he plays like a grandmaster. But by no stretch of the imagination is a 1900 player very good; there are too many holes in his game. In an open tournament, he would almost never win a prize (unless there was a reserve prize for his class). The useful conclusions for me are: (1) in a skill-based game a person can put in a lot of hours without developing much skill; (2) it takes very little skill to beat 95% of the other players; and (3) a person can be in the top 5% and still have almost no shot at the money. To reiterate, quality of hours is more important than the quantity.
RE: The 10,000 hour threshold Most trades apprenticeship are 4 years, which comes close to the 10,000 hour threshold. Add a year pre-apprenticeship course at the local college and you get the required 10,000 hours of training. 40 hour week x 52 weeks x 4 years = 8320 hours
This is though filled post. Chess has a rule set and market operators have a complete set of rules for participation. Over four hundred years there have been about 100 market changes. Trading is not competitive and all participants can be ranked by knowledge and skills. Generally speaking , no one has suggested thay they know how the markets work, however. Compared to a hedge fund's ROI an amateur may take up to a day to extract the same ROI as the hedge fund. The reason for this divergence is simply the trading context.