In those scenarios, what if the hard worker instead had backtested all of the situations and would make a more informed decision. A simply smart worker might figure out everything on the spot because you know...he's that smart.
What if the smart worker automated the test? What if the back test clouds your judgement of on-the-ground, fog-of-war perception? What if...what if, what if?... There will always be long-hand and shortcuts. If I can shortcut and get a substantially accurate answer to decide sooner than someone who does it 'properly' can get the precise answer, that buys me time to be patient and wait. Or if I discount most of the day's data as noise based on my experience and feel of the market, but instead focus on discrete order flow within the noise, who's to say the more pervasive survey of the market is also more accurate (hint: it's not). Being right enough on a larger sample set is likely more effective than being more right on a smaller set.
Well, you started with the 'what-if' type scenarios. I was pointing out that you make a lot of assumptions to support your view, assumptions not really based on anything. The only option is to look at the very successful traders and to which category they belong to. From what I've read and seen, they definitely work hard or maybe they're just doing it for appearances.
As I said: Of course it's all based on assumptions...but no more so than the alleged correlation between hard work and good work. In my experience I flatly reject that correlation, and in fact subscribe to its converse that hard work is bad work (or more accurately, less but more effective work, is better work). The correlation with hard work and good work seems very Luddite to me...long on belief, short on reason. That said, I'm all for the people that do the hard work...the more effort people put into something, the more predictable (read: normalized) their results will become. That translates into opportunity for people who exploit the gap between precision (hard work) and accuracy (big picture)...like me.
Hello, Working hard is not enough when it pertains to trading. For example, someone can spends years and years trading a purchased trading strategy called Get_Rich Strategy which buys when 13ema cross 54 ema, vice versa for sell. Use hmmmm 40 tick stop loss, and 80 tick profit target. Done. The trader works soooo hard to trade this and take every single trade. Then they lose big money for years. Then the trader goes to Trading Get Rich Guru Trading School with a bunch of books and learns the special easy way to trade for for about 8 months. And studies HARD too. And loses again. The trader worked extremely hard, but was not smart to ask the right questions to get 3rd party validation of these strategies and school they purchased. Time loss and money loss...all due to working hard. Trading is not like college, where you take allll the course and pass get a degree, then go make money working 9 to 5.
I still fail to see why hard work cannot also be effective work. From my experience anything worthwhile is not that easy, you need to work "hard" at it. Most things that are complex and consist of many components simply require time (work) because there are only so many short cuts to speed things up.
I think that apocryphal phrase normally attributed to Einstein was about genius. "Genius is 99% perspiration, 1% inspiration". I don't equate that terminology to trading. Trading is more like flying an aircraft as a pilot... 99% boredom, 1% sheer terror.
Trading is about 95 - 99 percent discipline, 1 - 5 percent luck once you have a proven strategy. Without a proven strategy, it's about 100 percent luck.