And if someone nailed down the quiz or otherwise showed amazing results trading from charts - the OP would also claim it was just luck as he already made up his mind. Confirmation bias is not reserved for the uneducated. This thread is a waste of time.
well that would be based on how they nailed each one? Did they guess randomly? Or did they have a reason for each.
This true for everything in life. But if someone scores a high score and has a reason for their choices, that would be a good indication that they might have a skill; though not a guarantee.
The next bar? That's a little too micro for me. Had the quiz been about the next sizable move, then I'd be game.
I'm sure it's fairly common both in life and trading to attribute results to skill when doing well and to back luck when doing bad. That's a luxury one may get away with in many other walks of life, but I think one needs to be brutally honest with oneself in order to succeed in trading. Unless one is a casual gambler or hobbyist like seems to be the case with most people here these days.
Warren Buffet said something like: "If all the monkeys in the world are picking stocks and there's one zoo where all the monkeys are doing it better than everyone else, you might want to go that zoo and test the water they are drinking." I can't find the exact quote so I had to paraphrase it.
I remember reading an analysis about how rich people think they are extremely smart, but it was shown that they were just incredibly lucky. Already, being born in the West vs. Asia or Africa should be considered winning the lottery. But this discussion you guys are having makes me think of the post I made in a different thread when LF and I were discussion Monte Carlos simulations. He mentioned how dropping the win rate of this system down just a little makes a huge change to expectancy. So I ran the numbers myself and came up with this which I posted in that thread. So here, being on the green line or red line both have the same probability as they are the outliers. If you so happen to be closer to the green line, you think you are doing well, but if your distribution of win was just a bit different, then it will be a completely different story. In trading of course, after thousands of trades, the large sample size will separate the wheat from the chaff as they say. For an "investor", I don't think there is enough time to run enough numbers. Most investors do well simply because of when they are born and when they start to invest. Real Estate pros also benefit mostly from luck of when they get into the market. Baby boomers had the biggest benefit, something that no other generation will see. I have read often that Buffet couldn't replicate what he did if he had to start in a different market, and that apparently for the past decade or two, his performance has been subpar. In fact, from what I recall, he should have lost it all in 2007 if it wasn't for favorable terms on his investments since he was such a big whale. So I'm not sure what my final point is except to say that anyone who is doing well should be extremely humble because there is likely far more outside of your control that helped you get to where you are than whatever was within your control.