Don't discount your own hard work to get back and straighten out your schooling, apply yourself properly with a new mindset. That life experience of seeing something through means personal growth. Rolling up your sleeves and doing what's needed speaks well of you. People whine because they aren't willing to do the same. This is not my quote, but a nice fit here.
"The harder I work, the luckier I get."
No need to explain for other people, they are who they are, you're different, so you can do what they can't. If you want better results, simply ask and work on craft.
In the markets, the big thing to understand is...
"Technicals and fundamentals don't move the market. Humans do." That IS my quote. And now I will prove it.
Take any stock. It's dead on a given day, no volume whatsoever. The technicals, PE ratio, all the fundamentals are what the are at that moment. The whole day has no volume, the price remains flat.
Take the same exact day, same stock, exact same technicals and fundamental, nothing different. On this day, hedge fund XYZ and MM ABC need to dump inventory, they're in trouble in a big way. At 7am, with no pre-market volume, they hit every buy order, sending the share price skyrocketing up. Traders jump in. At 8am, before the ticker's company even opens for business that day, they drop a massive sell order in, dropping the price far under the open.
Another example. Look at AMC today. No theatres were open at 9am, but from 9am to 10am, the share price went from 28./share to 34./share, then back to 27./share by 10am, all within one hour when the company wasn't even open for business, with no news.
What moved both stocks? How did any technical of any sort have anything to do with moving these stocks? They didn't, since they never changed. All the math in the world would not have given you a clue. Instead, if you read and traded the MMs intention, you'd make a nice profit. I know I did. MMs never use technicals, they never trade them, since humans move stocks, not "business math" of any sort. All of that is bait, nothing more.
All this is to say, if you trade the pumper's intention, understand what they do and how they do it, you'll make more and grow your account much faster and more reliably. Simply ask what you don't know, fill in the blanks, and build your craft.
Happy trades!