Reconciling "Random Walk" with "Market Wizards"

[eastbay]

I just read two books. The first was "Market Wizards" which is a series of interviews with successful traders, and as one example features a guy who entered a 4-month trading contest and won 9 out of 10 times by a large margin each time, by the name of Marty Schwartz.

And yet, on page 245 of "A Random Walk Down Wall Street", Malkiel makes the somewhat astonishing assertion that:

No one person or institution has yet to produce a long-term, consistent record of finding money-making, risk-adjusted individual stock-trading opportunities.

Now, I guess the catch-all "out" for this statement is "long term" and possibly "risk adjusted" although it's unclear to me what he means by that latter. But whatever example you point to, you could always just say "Not long term enough." But the claim in Market Wizards is that Schwartz has produced "enormous percentage gains every year since 1979." Now that's a somewhat vague statement, but it certainly sounds like a counterexample to Malkiel's assertion.

In any case, how can Malkiel make a statement like this if guys like Marty Schwartz really exist and really get the results they claim to?

There's really only two possibilities here: the so-called "Market Wizards" are frauds, or Malkiel is wrong.

Which do you think is closer to the truth?

eastbay