Quote from whitster:
there is a reason why second year college students are called "sophomore". the origins are from the Greek
Soph - wise
More - idiot (as in moron).
they are called sophomores because they are "wise" ie a bit schooled in academic theory but also MORONS because they think they know far more than they do, and they don't understand the difference between WISDOM and KNOWLEDGE
academics who opine on the market are simply salving their ego. most cannot actually TRADE, so they define all edges and success as statistical outliers in a random sequence
your math is SERIOUSLY lacking. if you are truly going to establish the statistics, do it with scalpers.
if i make (on average) 5 trades a day, that is well over 1000 trades a year
do that for 5 years successfully and that is over 5000 trades. if traders were truly only benefiting from randomness, then please consider the relatively probability of this # of individual events leading to positive expectancy, ESPECIALLY considering transaction costs and slippage
it is fallacious to use the # of traders as the variable
the issue is the # of trades.
if you enter one trade a year, and are successful that could obviously be random.
with thousands of trades, there is no way randomness could account for anywhere NEAR the # of successful traders that are out there.
to state it would be statistically unlikely is a gross understatement
I'm a little late to the party, but great post whitster...