Depends on your personality. I would fail miserably running most types of businesses. As a Nerd type (INTJ), trading came quite easy after i taught myself. This personality type, INTJ, is actually the most suited to trading, especially the non floor based trading we have now adays. This is not to say other personality types cant become traders, only it is supposed to be more natural for us. Other lines of business will have other ideal personality types.
How do you arrive at such an absolute statement? How do you know one can easily be taught and the other simply can't be easily taught? I am self-taught both in both brick and mortar and trading. My university degree was largely (or completely?) worthless in both professions. Whatever they taught us there was a bunch of hog-wash. Neither running a business nor trading was easy. Nothing was ever easy to implement. I made plenty of painful mistakes along the way.
If you have discipline and a valid profitbale methodology it can be a business. Take 100k and open a restaurant and give me 100k to trade for you. I have a very good idea who will still have thier intial 100k at the end of the year. EF
You're operating on a false premise that under all circumstances risk is equally proportionate to reward. That's not simple stats, it's flawed stats. Two opportunities for equivalent gain do not necessarily carry equivalent risk. That is precisely why we have stats like sharp ratios. In fact, your statements are contradictory. If in fact risk were always equally proportionate to return, it doesn't matter what you do, you're just a series of coin flips away from blowup. The successful traders you refer to figured out how to tilt those stats in their favor.
Because I have a ton of experience in both teaching how to run a successful business and teaching how to trade. Give me a group of 100 entrepreneurs with a conventional business idea and a group of 100 new traders. For every one successful trader there will be at least five successful entrepreneurs.
You are selecting your 100 entrepreneurs, because they have a history? What are about your traders? Lets take the turtles, they were carefully selected based on various criteria (not trading history) and not just random wanabes off the street, and they were given a profitable business plan. I believe the success rate was over 50%.
That's one of the points from the original post. If you perform a cross section of new traders, the group is wildly diverse. Filled with people who don't have and will never have the personality or talents to trade successfully. In most businesses a person knows before hand whether he possesses at least a good part of the necessary skill set. What I'm saying is that for most businesses the rules for profitability are actually quite simple and definitive. "If you make this adjustment,... Such and such will be the result." Problems are easy to fix and the solutions are easily taught. Not the case in trading.
It would be fun to watch a trading version of The Apprentice. The title can even be The Trading Apprentice. Instead of the catch phrase "you're fired" it will be "your money is goodbye". I would watch it.
Now you are getting there!!! That's the point!!! The trading methodology is backwards. People rarely elect to start a business venture when they are completely unfamiliar with the method for success. They choose an industry they are already skilled in. This increases their chances. Traders don't do this. They try to develop a new skill set after starting. It's backwards.
Trading 1 contract CL with a $50K account and a maximum stop loss on each trade of $150, means that I have very little of my account at risk at any moment in time. My trades last from 10 seconds to sometimes nearly an hour, so time-wise my exposure is rather limited as well. In the even of a black swan event causing a massive move against me with slippage, the price of CL would have to drop or rise $50 before my stop loss order was filled to wipe out my entire account. I don't believe this is possible because of limit up/limit down regulations.