but as victor niederhoffer learned the hard way, that loss on the 10th time can really bite you in the ass
for every successful WSB poster their are 10,000 that are going broke. But they have balls and take risks which IMO is essential to success in any form.
Most of them do not make it to the 10th trade. Imagine, if these guys have lost 90% of their monies, what would stop them from going all in the very next trade? Wall Street sharks licking their chops ready to chomp on their next meal.
Almost every forum is the same in that regard. If you pay closer attention to the posters who are most vocal during a pronounced move, you will find they usually disappear when the opposite move appears and vice-versa. So yes, like everyone else says it's a reporting bias. If you are easily misled or new to this sort of thing, you will come away with the impression that "everyone is making money" but it's basic human nature to only want to announce one's wins while pretending that one never loses. Sadly, this gives a bunch of newbie traders a false impression.
This is 100% spot on. All i'd like to add is that theyre going to get wiped out once IV starts dropping and their directional delta bets are wrong. Sideways market will smoke a lot of these guys and they wont know what hit them.
Echoing everyone here. I'd like to add that proof of their losses comes from their account sizes which are typically 5-20k. If they make such huge returns, why are their accounts still almost nonexistent. If they'd be continuously successful, I'm sure they'd like to post their YOLO trades with capitalization of 1mm and up. More likely they blow 10 small accounts over a long period and post the one that really worked out well.
There's risk taking and "YOLO" gambling. They practice the latter. Few want to actually trade themselves up with more sane risk parameters because that's not exciting. They blame boomers for not having money etc. Quite hilarious.
Put $200K on a long $TSLA straddle/strangle while IV is low. IV explodes. $TSLA moves huge. One leg goes to 0, other leg goes to infinity. That's the most recent guy. You need to repeat these moves over and over starting from a smaller account and get it right more than wrong. There is most definitely skill involved.