This may appear to be a forced comparison...But I honestly look at professional(i.e. people who derive their sole source of income or bulk of their income from trading) trading and professional golf as very similar fields...Like the PGA Tour where you have to EARN your paycheck from week to week, where in any given year you can find yourself bumped from the Tour and back at the Q-School...where week in and week out you have to trust your "swing" and focus almost exclusively on the "now" moment, where you are up against other professionals who have just as much talent and are as just as hungry...One year you can be at the top and two or three years down the road you can be out of the game working as a club pro or struggling on the mini-tours...
Trading is no different...One year you can really be "on" and one year you can be "off"...Hopefully, if you have enough self-knowledge you can detect if/when things are not going right mid-way through the trading day and not get annihilated...But that takes experience and objectivity, not unlike that of a professional golfer...
If you ask many of the former great pros on the PGA Tour what went wrong, you will often hear them say, that they "listened" to someone else's opinion about what the perfect swing was or they made unnecessary changes and eventually lost the "feel" for the golf swing and the game itself...The best golfers know their own swing better than anyone else and any changes they make are minor...On the other hand, amateur golfers are constantly picking up issues of Golf Digest(Active Trader, Futures Magazine) and reading articles written by "Club" Pro's who do not have the talent to make it on the big tour, but can tell anyone who wants to listen "how" to do it, but cannot lead by example...It is no different with the trading industry, you can pick up any book, magazine, etc, etc... and find plenty of opinions about how best to do it, but 9/10 times the people preaching the information are not the greatest practioners...
I am not going to claim that Teresa Lo or whomever else was mentioned as chat room trader cannot trade or does not have any worthwhile advice, I feel that it is just the contrary...She probably has an excellent grasp of trading and makes money for herself, it might not be seven or eight figures, but that is not really too important for the people she is instructing...Personally, I feel that many of these people who trade AND run advisory services are like the members of the professional tours who know that any given day they can lose their "swing"(edge) and have a whole lot of financial responsibilities without any source of income...This is not to say that they cannot trade, just that they may have a better understanding of their limits as traders...After all not everyone was born to be a Marty Schwartz, Monroe Trout or Tudor Jones...
For what it's worth
