[gadrev]

Agreed about the statistic of failure rate. For consistent profitablity it's probably at or below 2%, even if it's higher in a given year. The reason is not only lack of a strategy that doesn't depend on specific market conditions, but often (unless you're talking about algos) is psychological. Trading is psychologically very difficult.

You're right in that most of the time, the directional probability of the market is close to 50% for a 1:1 trade.

There are instances where the directional probability is significantly above 50% to make a trade have a positive EV (if it's not 1:1, the baseline is not 50%, and there are similarly moments where the directional probability for a different risk-reward is above its baseline for some direction). Different strategies tailor to different RRs, but you can absolutely find those entries.

However, as you said it's easy to get caught up in the illusion of profitability for a given market condition. For example, in a strong bull market like the post COVID stimulus, you could trade to the long side in a large timeframe and just win money because of the anomaly of such a protracted spike in the daily charts.

That's not a sustainable strategy though which explains what happened to your friends. A price action system that takes into account markets structure works in every environment, be it ranging, surging or a bear market.

Learning price action TA takes time to learn though, it's a skill like when we learned to code till the time we got paid for it. And trading, in general, goes against how our brain works. Psychology is the great barrier to profitability once you have a strategy. It explains the high failure rate. it being a hard skill is why there's so few people doing it, But it's not because it needs a very high IQ or Rafa Nadal's strength of mind. Most people could get there, but it takes a lot of effort, and theres so much deception and scamming around it, it's easier to pretend it's impossible based on the amount of people that fail.