This is not true and in fact when I hire quants or developers, I have to spend a surprising amount of time even teaching people with PhD's in statistics that the random nature of the stock market does not mean that it's a coin toss. It's surprising the number of people who should know better think trading is just about being right 51% of the time, or that typically stocks have a 50/50 chance of going up or down at any given moment...
What's closer to the truth is that stocks are actually quite predictable the overwhelming majority of the time, but a single mistake can end up costing you dearly. You can be right 95% of the time, and then lose everything you ever made in the remaining 5% of the time. A stock might go up 10 times in a row, and then on the 11th trial, it wipes out everything it made and then some.
Arnt|1 year ago
Maxatar|1 year ago
This is not true and in fact when I hire quants or developers, I have to spend a surprising amount of time even teaching people with PhD's in statistics that the random nature of the stock market does not mean that it's a coin toss. It's surprising the number of people who should know better think trading is just about being right 51% of the time, or that typically stocks have a 50/50 chance of going up or down at any given moment...
What's closer to the truth is that stocks are actually quite predictable the overwhelming majority of the time, but a single mistake can end up costing you dearly. You can be right 95% of the time, and then lose everything you ever made in the remaining 5% of the time. A stock might go up 10 times in a row, and then on the 11th trial, it wipes out everything it made and then some.