It seems to me that a person with a superior intellect and emotional control can outperform the market...
If there is luck in being a winner, it is that you were born a winner! The good news is that you do not know that until your life passes
That's why in trading you don't bet on the market - you bet on yourself. I don't think that success in trading has anything to do with the market or its efficiency because actually the money you make comes from the pockets of the traders who bet that they are smarter than you, but they are wrong...
This may be a little bit twisted, but I also think that some people get more money and success not because they are lucky but because they are simply more valuable to the others because of their talents. Market speculation is no different.
And one last thing - even though the future cannot be "predicted" some people "predict" the future better than others and take their money accordingly. This is because the future course of events can be extracted from the available information and a proper analysis. The better the information and the deeper the analysis - the more precise the prognosis. Now don't sell me this crap about how efficient the market is, how well the information is distributed and how everybody is making the same correct conclusions. They don't. Even the toss of a coin is not purely random and you can predict the outcome if you have all the relevant data.
Case study: When you go to a supermarket you notice that every queue is evenly long. You can't see a shorter queue and take advantage of it. But you see that there are a couple of cash desks with no cashiers... There are no people there... yet. Now there are three independent persons, waiting on the near-by queues. One of them hears on the loudspeakers that they call a cashier to come to the empty cash desk. The other comes to the supermarket often and has remembered the faces of the cashiers and just sees one of them approaching the empty cash-desk. The third one, notices that two other persons (guess who?) are moving out of their queues and heading for the empty cash desk. Within seconds the three persons are first on the empty cash desk and after another few seconds a queue forms behind them which is as long as the others.
The question is - were these three persons that appear first on the new queue lucky to be there or were they smarter, faster and more decisive then the rest of the people waiting in the supermarket...?