> There are people with more capital, time, and knowledge than you who will consistently beat you.
I think it's more than that. There are people with more capital etc. who specifically use that to take advantage of people like you. I don't just mean pump-and-dump kinds of stuff either. HFT exists to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunities created by traditional kinds of trading in aggregate (and sometimes to take advantage of other HFT bots) creating a kind of "friction" that is hard for less capitalized traders to overcome. The market is as much of a fight as a race, and it's really hard to win against the heavyweights unless you're one yourself.
> Picking individual investments is mostly a sucker's game.
Definitely true in the short term, for the reasons mentioned above. Still mostly true in the longer term. At least there's a chance that a sufficiently canny investor can pick a basket of stocks that will grow over time, but statistically it's almost certain that you'll fall behind the S&P index. Even the very best fund managers, with all of the resources at their disposal, rarely beat that more than a couple of years in a row.
I think it's more than that. There are people with more capital etc. who specifically use that to take advantage of people like you. I don't just mean pump-and-dump kinds of stuff either. HFT exists to take advantage of the arbitrage opportunities created by traditional kinds of trading in aggregate (and sometimes to take advantage of other HFT bots) creating a kind of "friction" that is hard for less capitalized traders to overcome. The market is as much of a fight as a race, and it's really hard to win against the heavyweights unless you're one yourself.
> Picking individual investments is mostly a sucker's game.
Definitely true in the short term, for the reasons mentioned above. Still mostly true in the longer term. At least there's a chance that a sufficiently canny investor can pick a basket of stocks that will grow over time, but statistically it's almost certain that you'll fall behind the S&P index. Even the very best fund managers, with all of the resources at their disposal, rarely beat that more than a couple of years in a row.