That can be the impression. But perhaps that's more often so among people who "aren't reading the right books" (a circular argument, in a sense, since I'm arguably defining "right" as being "not the ones to which that applies", though more generally, books purporting to present "systems that can profitably be copied" are much less likely to turn out to be "the right ones" than those teaching general principles about market behaviour learned from their authors' experiences, etc., and of course there are reasons for that).
In my mis-spent youth, I bought backtesting software and a decade's price data, and backtested, as far as I was able to - among a lot of other things - almost every system covered in a well-known book by Kathy Lien & Boris Schlossberg (none was profitable, and one in particular was so dreadful that I even seriously wondered whether 'fading' every entry might be worthwhile), almost every system covered in an equally well-known book by Linda Bradford Raschke & Larry Connors (these were collectively not quite so bad, and one system appeared to be just about profitable without any terrifying drawdowns, and it was worthwhile and beneficial for me to study it in detail to see why it was just about profitable and what the underlying principle was behind the indicator combination that apparently made it so), and almost every system listed among the Babypips "Best Forex Trading Systems Hall of Fame Past Winners" (none was profitable, and some were frankly laughable even to someone with as little experience as I then had) ... it seemed to me, then, in a sense, that trading is a strange activity in which studying wasn't very helpful, but (fortunately for me) not long after that I learned what "studying" really means and came to understand why I'd been more or less wasting my time with all that nonsense.
Now you're talking ...
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