That would lead to all traders failing, not just most. The market is sometimes efficient and other times inefficient. Those who know how to take advantage of the inefficient times are the winners.
All short term money made taking the market's offer is the result of market inefficiency. Intermediate term or slower profits can be attributed to value added in markets. Often failure of those who could be called traders comes from not knowing the difference. Failure of ET members is a different story. All potential traders begin in a state of ignorance. Usually their minds are empty. From this point onward it is up to the potential trader to make the correct decisions in acquiring knowledge and skills. Wrong decision making while learning is a primal cause of failure. Beliefs come into the mind as a consequence of decisions to believe. It is nearly impossible to remove the consequences of wrong decisions from the mind. This leads to the potential trader being placed in a position from which he cannot recover intellectually. A tipping point is reached and it is irreversable. Most mental growth occurs during sleeping hours. It is here where the unconscious preception joins the conscious perception. The mind is very limited in its ability to enjoin incompatible concepts. So it cannot build a rational set of knowledge. The trading knowledge spectrum is very orderly and grows as a person assembles the parts in a learning process. Repeated drills shorten the required learning to a matter of days in a few weeks. Learning to trade is like learning to actually drive a car. It is true that before learning to drive a person is well experienced as an observer. Almost no one fails to learn to drive. Elsewhere others have agreed that any fifth grader is capable of learnng to trade when mentored by a knowledgable mentor. Non mentored potential traders almost always fail because the learning is so irrational. The mind cannot resolve irrational learning. In ET, the membership revolves as failure to learn occurs. The greatest entertainment factor in ET is the losers who do not know they do not know arguing with anyone who entertains their specious thinking. Watch some of ET's favorite non contributors repeat their beliefs over and over. A stagnated mind is a mind where the sleep time merging of new information has ceased to move tha person's mind forward. Here, we all read about the potential trader's problems. the persons get to where they are by making mistaken decisions. One leads to another. The collection of beliefs are incompatible and not removable. As we listen to the output of such persons we hear that they object to what they cannot take in. I know I speak a foreign language of markets here. I hear about my shortcomings a lot of the time. I find that most persons do not believe what I post. I agree that they cannot understand or believe what I say. They are correct from their seasoned viewpoints. I have had some deep experiences in dealing with those who differ from my views. My history with the SEC is significant. I am glad I did not become a criminal in the public eye. It was a great learning experience to watch others fail to understand what I was doing. Why do regulators fail? In my case it was simply not knowing what was going on. How can the SEC's failure be the standard for measuring my success? I feel it is very common in the trading world for people to not understand each other. I believe the reason is that it is not possible to envision another world if it is different than one's own world. If all trader's used the same language as the market (as is done in music or engineering drawings), then it might be possible for more exchange of information. If and when a person makes a wrong decision about knowledge, then the consequences isolate him more and more from what he could possible grow to understand. Someone here thinks formal education helps a person to become a better trader. Sitting in the environment of formal education can only be, at best, a catalyst; in reality, it is up to the thinking processes of the mind. Markets are very counterintuitive. If a person tries to learn without an open mind, he is going to have failure. Prentice Hall allowed the publication of a book. The first words in the book cite a "hazardous journey" of many years duration". I do believe the author and his description of the stuggle he had. He failed. The blackened swan guy does the same wrong thing. Failure is all around in the Financial Industry. In fact, failure is the standard of the FI. How can the first 18 bars of Friday (6SEP13) be equal to 10 years of the average hedge fund performance? The market offers; the market is a psychological whole that represents it's participants. Read this issue of Bloomberg/businessweek. Failure is the watchword of the entire financial industry. And no one knows it at the time. No one goes to jail.
That dude has way too much time with nothing to do. Real traders don't write so much meaningless drivel.
Whatever "method" or "pattern" or "inefficiency" one uses to make money in the markets currently, one can always rest assured that something will change in the markets that will render that strategy unprofitable or far less profitable. The difficulty for the trader is to be able to see the change when it occurs and minimize his losses, while being able to successfully identify the inefficiencies in the new environment. Something easier said than done. "Black box" trend traders like John Henry have been proven unable to adapt. Peter Brandt has noted the many pattern failures of TA resulting in 'chart morphing.' Or the time when hedge fund LTCM had expected bond spreads to narrow (like it did historically) instead of widen. All these show the difficulty in adapting. That's one reason traders fail. Underlying this idea is that a particular market inefficiency never lasts for long. The winners are the good adapters. The losers keep doing the same thing over and over again.
lots of empty words. show the meat. only ones that I know win, are big banks that manipulate markets by controlling governments and connected few with inside info. plenty of ex market wizards out there, some have ben simply dumped from inner circles.
You happen to be incorrect in my opinion. An alternative view is that those whose systems cease working, never completed their system development and/or design. Henry did not even get to a good performance level. Brandt could have gone much further by doing trend analysis as a context for observing the patterns he thought he saw morphing. When a person works without a context, he doen't get very far. Bond spreads widen or narrow. A system for bonds takes this into account. Perhaps you have not gone very far in reasoning. If you were to begin, you might find the foundation for considering markets. The markets have very few parts. Markets are even more simple than the Periodic Table.
kut2 is way far ahead of you. If he posted the meat he uses you would whine about not understanding him. Big banks do not make much of the money offered in trading markets.