10000h rule doesn't apply to trading..there was a study on that in S.Korea but I can't find it now.. why this poll anyway? there are plenty of published papers on the behaviour of individual investors,here is one: 'CONCLUSION The investors who inhabit the real world and those who populate academic models are distant cousins. In theory, investors hold well-diversified portfolios and trade infre-quently so as to minimize taxes and other investment costs. In practice, investors behave differently. They trade frequently and have perverse stock selection ability, incurring unnecessary investment costs and return losses. They tend to sell their winners and hold their losers, generating unnecessary tax liabilities. Many hold poorly diversified port-folios, resulting in unnecessarily high levels of diversifiable risk, and many are unduly influenced by media and past experience. Individual investors who ignore the prescrip-tive advice to buy and hold low-fee, well-diversified portfolios, generally do so to their detriment.' all sorts of biases which are not so easy to overcome..actually you need to be subhuman to trade profitably... / see Dest case - he is the devil himself ) / https://faculty.haas.berkeley.edu/odean/papers current versions/behavior of individual investors.pdf
70-80% of traders active today have not bothered to learn to trade and either don't intend to or they'll get wiped out before they can.
Where on earth do you get this number from? Were YOU profitable in 2 weeks? Such a ludicrous assertion I think this is probably a troll. You'll get lots of replies anyways My take: Unless you have a very low bar for your definition of profitable, no way. Buy and hold SPY doesn't count here. Neither does buying cryptos in a crazy bull market, etc. Most traders' definition of profitable is being able to make a sustainable good living from trading, no other sources of income. Ideally green every month, and without huge starting wealth. This is absolutely not achievable in "about 2 weeks" even for a genius. Most people that have achieved this kind of success have put in many thousands of hours, myself included. Check out some of the market wizards books and read their stories. Years of experience is the norm. EDIT: What makes this even funnier is that unless you are HFT, you probably need at least several months to even gain reasonable statistical significance to answering the question of whether you are profitable. Never mind 2 weeks.
I understand your incredulity, and its quite true that many profitable traders spent years losing money and wiping out accounts before they broke through. I also have to be really clear about what I'm saying. Which is that its possible to achieve competence with a profitable system within 2 weeks. I'm not saying develop a profitable system from nowhere, I'm not saying necessarily even have money rolling in. What I'm saying is that a new trader could learn a conventional long-term trading strategy, take some time to understand their platform, learn how the strategy works, practice it in real world situations and start trading, all within 2 weeks. The fact that most traders don't do this has more to do with the attitudes of new traders than the complexities of trading.
I love your posts on ET. As a slight detour - In one of the organisations I used to work for I was assistant to a boss who regularly delayed him and me and other colleagues and teams under him from starting a job until we had just 5 minutes before the deadline. Especially if it was a job that did not have a pre-defined structure so could potentially expand to fill unlimited time. His idea was that if he wanted his staff to just spend 5 minutes on a job, just give them 5 minutes before it had to be completed. It was a crude form of time management. In your case, if you're seriously saying you've spent 13 years before achieving profitability, then surely you have to ask yourself why. Was your system so complex it took 13 years to learn and understand, or did it take 13 years to find a profitable system, or what?