For 4 months we had no news, market kept rising steadily, no news whatsoever, just boring tv announcers saying everynight "we have no news, other than Trump has got lockjaw".
I would rather say a difficult work. Because it is difficult it can take a lot of time and need hard work, but if you are lucky and find a good edge by accident it is not hard work at all. Difficult is not always the same as hard. Difficult work or hard work are two completely different things.
Discovering/constructing a trading system is both difficult and hard for a beginner. The big problem, many believe the answer is found in complexity. You'll often see it when noobs explain their theories in a journal, total gibberish and to convince the audience, throw in techno jargon. But after climbing many obstacles and arrving with a profitable system, then comes the journey of simplifying everything. You'll hear it here many times, "KISS". But arriving at KISS is usually a very big effort initially.
My personal experience is that KISS does not work as good as a more complex system like I use. To know what is best you should have the performance records of both systems. I compared them and the difference was really big. The problems to create a more performant system were really big too.
Agree and Disagree. Ultimately everything is a math problem and there is nothing that a human trader does that is magic that can't also be done by an algorithm. Difficult yes, but not impossible. It's true that engineers often fail in markets. But many of the best traders are also engineers. The early failures come because they attempt to apply the classical mathematical tools and techniques that they learned in school, e.g. simple linear regression, which tend to not be suitable for the insanely high noise:signal ratio that exists in markets. The ultimate solution to this problem is to discover appropriate techniques, not to throw up one's hands and say "oh well, it must be more of an art than a science".