Which sounds similar to how gambling addicts report their thoughts on their addiction - that they are smart enough to learn poker, or they know enough basketball to be able to predict outcomes.
Like with everything else, some research and data interpretation shows that with the remarkable exception of two or three highly specialized companies that employ some of the best mathematicians alive, most active investors underperform.
Warren Buffet bet a million against Ted Seides (head of Protege at the time) that a simple index fund investment would outperform any handpicked selection of hedge funds over a decade. And critically this bet was made in 2008 just before the market crashed! That's when hedge funds should disproportionately shine, as per their name, by hedging. In the end it wasn't even close.
[1] - https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/030916/buffe...
Some people are smart enough to learn poker, and build careers out of them. And there are many books on poker. You picked a poor example.
Which is exactly what an amateur trader thinks - I will learn to beat the market, because Ray Dalio did.
I used the poker example precisely because of this parallel between a very small elite and an overwhelming majority of loss makers.
You're also right that it triggers the addiction itch in some vulnerable individuals!
I play poker and would never be stupid enough to put real money on it. It's great as a social game for me where 25 dollars is the risk.
Don't hate the game...
This whole thread is casinos arguing against regulation because casual poker players don’t get addicted. We have billions of dollars targeting young people (mostly single young men) with gambling, from zero-day options trading to crypto and sports betting.
Former options market maker. The industry was dead for a decade until the pandemic. It’s now more profitable than ever. Lots of negative-alpha orders that can be predictably sorted from the flow. Market makers are seeing casino-like margins on some subsets of flow; that signals a problem.
How do you educate someone so confidently and consistently wrong in their world? Someone who INSISTS that "No, this letter from BBBY that says that we are going to see massive share dilution when 500k new shares are printed and sold to pay down debts before the company is shut down, is a lie because they actually are going to magically transform into a new competitor against Amazon because Ryan Cohen (a man who was only part of BBBY for like a month) is going to be the new CEO and make us all rich"
When those shares dropped at an obviously stupid price with zero future value, they bought them by the hundreds and LITERALLY wrote "thank you for the tasty dip"