When it comes to trading, however, it turns out that the skills we learn to earn high marks in school, advance our careers, and create relationships with other people, the skills we are taught that should carry us through life, turn out to be inappropriate for trading. Traders, we find out, must learn to think in terms of probabilities and to surrender all of the skills we have acquired to achieve in virtually every other aspect of our lives.
I agree with this to a point, but it's not a law. Jim Simons is one of the smartest quants on the planet. He's woth $US25 Billion. To start his hedge fund, he went out looking for super-smart PhDs from backgrounds in maths & physics. He avoided people in banking and finance because he didn't want them to bring any of the 'knowledge' that circulates in the trading world. He knew that stuff didn't work because hedge funds at the time were only matching the market, not beating it. It's still true for most hedge and managed funds.
Anyway, his famous Medallion Fund returned an average of 66% pa for 30 years straight. Many of his employees became extremely rich just by holding units in the fund for a few decades.
What we don't know is how he would have fared if he'd not used such sophisticated methods. It's quite possible he would have matched his performance by using simple methods. Maybe he'd have done better. Maybe worse. Mindset or attitude seems to be the holy grail in trading. It's covered in Mark Douglas' books. One of them you listed above.
Back in the early days of crypto, some people had a hunch that buying a few BTC might be a good bet. No knowledge, just a punt. If they held on, they're now multi-millionaires. So that's the opposite side of the coin. There's an infinate number of ways to succeed and fail. But most people who trade will fail in the long term. At least 9 out of 10. Broker data proves that.
