Do you trade fulltime? Partime? If so, are you successful? Please give us a little background about your experiences so we can see why you feel the way you do.
Traders are trying to profit from future events that have not yet happened and therefor there is always a degree of luck involved even if very small. Unless you know the future, there's always a chance that you will be wrong, no matter how skilled you are. To say that trading is 100% skill just does not make sense IMO.
The only way this is true if they are milking an edge. It's not trading luck but more of a being at the right time in the right place thing. And those traders end up leaving once the edge is gone. There has been a big run of those from NYOB steppers, bullets, Millenium/NYFIX and now as tapereading the specialist slowly becomes extinct. But to say that someone can be consistently profitable on a daily basis for a couple years just based on trading luck, that's a far stretch. It's also easily disproved if you go over the trades of the individual. You'll find patterns in the losses, the wins, the # of trades and time periods, which means the trades are not random.
In other words, you probably feel that what I'm saying is quite reasonable, but if only I could be exposed as some bitter crank, you could then rest easy and forget about the implications of my reasoning. The lengths some people go to... Just to recap, I never said that all trading results were due to chance. They might be, and that is indeed what financial theory predicts. But I'll allow that there is room for skill in trading. But nevertheless, there does seem to be a large element of randomness in market behavior, even if it is not omnipresent. The existence of such random behavior does imply that some trading results will be the result of luck, however. And what I originally said is that traders massively underestimate this. To the poster who talked about robust systems. If you run Monte Carlo simulations on those systems, you'll find that as robust as they are, there is still a chance (often very small, but nevertheless) of going bust. Quite simply, in trading, you can be doing 'everything right' and lose money, and do 'everything wrong' and make it. Lastly, it's not as if experience doesn't bear out what I'm saying. Trading consistency is rare. Trading results of even the best traders show great variability, even when profitable over long periods of time. During such variable times, 'incorrect' leverage will bust them, or draw them down to the point of throwing in the towel. And that's exactly what we observe. (Of course, that doesn't apply to ET's daytrading elite, making the steady 1k/day on MACD crossovers or tapereading the specialist.)
Do you mean consistency as in profitability? , or consistant in how they trade (strategy)?. What are the variables that lead to the inconsistantcy?
Don't agree with the above at all. Golf can be seen as similar to trading. Each week a different course is played. One week it can be tight and shorter, next week longer and more wide open. Some players excel in certain playing conditions, not unlike the market. A guy can miss the 36 hole cut one week and finish in the top 10 the following week. Golf is an individual game against the course just as trading is a "game" against the market. You can be wrong in trading 50% or more of the time and make a living. Same in golf .. a pro can miss a lot of cuts and retain his tour card with some top 10's and/or a win in some given event. Golf, like trading, also has a psychological aspects in achieving success. In BOTH professions it takes a LOT of determination, effort and focus. To suggest someone can do everything right and fail just doesn't make sense. If you're doing EVERYTHING right in trading you will make some $$$. You may be doing only some things right and lose $$$. Same with golf ... a player can be so very close to where he wants to be but needs to fine tune his swing. Same with trading. And yes, trading results can show variability. But skilled traders, just like skilled PGA pros, maintain some consistency over the longer term and thus they're successful. And it takes CONSTANT effort to keep your "game" on top to where you're successful. It isn't a result of "chance" as you state above re: financial theory predicts.
Consistency as in achieving the same profitability every time period ($X a day/week/month or hell even year).
I was talking with respect to backtested trading systems. But yes, it's quite true that one can trade a 'robust' system properly (ie adhere to its rules, completely) and still lose money. As long as such a trader doesn't lose everything, and his system truly is robust (and markets aren't completely random), he should eventually come back into profitability. But how many could tolerate the drawdowns or the length of time being in drawdown? Not many. (And that includes traders who understand that there was always a possibility of such occurring. But such a trader is still faced with the uncertainty about the robustness of his system. Such doubts can cause him to junk it, too.)