Stock picking is a skill like any other skills that can be learned. It's not for everyone. It's just as engineering, medical, arts skills are not for every one. In fact, the higher the expected return in investment, the harder to squeeze out more return and there will be fewer people able to do it. It's simple: the higher the mountain, the harder it is to climb.
It's hard to win the state lottery. Despite this, some people win multiple times! Neither of which indicate a measure of a skill.
One of the weirdest things about outcomes of decisions, and statistics in general, is that the result isn't a great measure of the quality of the decision process. A person can make awful decisions in a field ripe for success and think they made good decision because they "win" constantly. If most decisions would get you a 90% chance success rate, and your decisions give you a 60% chance rate, in a binary situation you would have no idea that you bogged things up. Or vice versa, if you were working with a 1% chance rate and increased it to a 3% chance rate, you have effectively tripled your chance of success- but you might still feel that you made poor decisions because of your bad outcomes.
OR, consider the simple randomness. You might have a 5% chance of success. If you get luck on the first go, then you might hit that 1 in 20 chance and think you did good! This is the same reason folks were taken aback when Trump won presidency in 2016. He had a 35% chance of getting in based on polls. People attacked the polls for being inaccurate, but in fact he just hit the 1 in 3 chance of getting in. The polls were actually incredibly accurate when analyzed on a local basis, everything just swung toward the lower end of the margin of error.
These types of human psychology and statistical things are what I look at when taking a big picture look at stocks picking. I don't use examples of success as indicators that it is a reasonable pursuit. Because in bell curve of randomness, some people will look successful when in fact they are just perfect examples of the statistics playing out. Personal ego would re-enforce this belief. A psychological phenomenon is to attribute success to personal merit and failures to external causes. So anyone succeeding in the stock market is biologically tuned to think that there is something special about themselves and prevent them from realizing the more psychologically depressing reality of randomness. This is a human defense mechanism to boost confidence and reduce decision paralysis.
It is in fact the people who admit to getting lucky in the market that are more rare and aware of their situation than stock pickers. Another interesting thing about human psychology is that it affects even the smartest of us. Clever people are even better at explaining away their actions so that they don't seem based in more primitive processes.
All of that is to say I'm not buying it ;)
