Hacker News Reader

> There are also the rare individuals who have some method that has been shown to work and they follow it with great discipline.

People like this can win at roulette, too.

(Well, for a while.)

View on HN

There are a few traders in history that beat the market in a statistically significant way for basically their entire career. It is a small number <20, but they exist. The issue is that everyone thinks "I can do that". Most people can't.

You'd expect that too. Get enough people flipping coins and a few of them are going to have long streaks of heads.

Plus once you've had a record of success opportunities come your way that aren't generally available. You try and buy GS preferred stock with a 10% dividend and warrants on top and see how far you get.

one of the best ways to evidence a falsified data set on coin flips is to determine if long enough streaks are not present.

>There are a few traders in history that beat the market in a statistically significant way for basically their entire career.

Given the vast number of market players, what counts as "statistically significant"? A probability of seeing results at least as good as theirs by chance of 1 in 20? 1 in 100? 1 in 1000? 1 in 10,000?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com