[Wildbill]

My take on it is that you can make some money at it, but people don't enter it to make SOME money, they enter it thinking they can spend a few hours a day making 10 times what they do at the office. Further its not something that can be done by anyone, it like most ventures that involve risks requires proper perspective and discipline. Taking a job to work for a large company involves little risk, starting your own business or daytrading involves enormous risk. People just don't grasp this concept. The volatility of risk will kill most people that don't accept this and remember this and live by this. It would be one thing if you traded in a vacuum and looked at every trade for its merits. Think about the usual trader though, they are victims of their own successes and failures. If they go on a winning streak, they think they have found the infallible system or method and never tweak it or accept that it can easily lose its effectiveness over time. The people that hit a losing streak don't properly accept the downside and they go and change their method with no real clue as to if their tweaking or switching to completely different ways of picking stocks will actually work better than the old way. This is without a doubt the biggest impediment and what will wipe out 90% of the people that might even be properly bankrolled. To look at it and say you can or can't do it with charts or a system far understates the real problem here.

BTW, I think the deflating bubble should have made a lot of people rich, but most people paid no heed to shorting during that time. A true professional at everything uses every tool he has in his toolbox and leaves very little out on the table. The people that got wiped out in the bubble weren't real professionals so we shouldn't make too many conclusions off what happened over that timeframe.