I stand by the statement. Maybe it requires further elaboration....

I stand by the statement. Maybe it requires further elaboration. There are no traders consistently in the top N richest people in the world: yet there are fundamental investors. There are extensive records of fundamental investors who have out performed the market consistently over extended periods of time, there are no such records of traders. There are records of traders who have done extraordinarily well over short periods of time. All have thrown in the towel because they know it's unsustainable in the long term, or they've gone broke trying to prove otherwise. If this weren't the case, the top N richest people in the world would be littered with traders. There are traders that make a decent enough living over an extended period of time, but if they are active traders they don't have a day job which means not only do they need to cover the tax disadvantage component of their profits they also need to cover their base salary as well. I wouldn't call these true successes though. I'll happily be proved otherwise on any of this based upon supporting evidence.