Magic 100 short question

Forex is cruel. For every trader there’s a snake. Took me a long time to figure out why brokers would advertise high-R trades when they’re the ones that would lose.

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Yes indeed.

It’s not exactly “instinctively obvious,” though, is it? :sweat_smile:

I would respectfully add a fourth group (very visible online): people who “have always believed the consensus of opinion” and just don’t want to “be wrong” about it and are unwilling - for either face-saving or emotional reasons - to change their minds about their mistaken beliefs.

“Learning” and “being right” can become mutually exclusive when you’ve been doing something for quite a while. Especially when you’ve been doing it really badly for quite a while. And an awful lot of forex traders are in that camp.

They use Metatrader without understanding how much it sets the odds against them.

They don’t even begin understand what “brokers” and “markets” are.

They think hugely high leverage is their friend.

They think high reward/risk ratios are their friend because that way they can afford to guess wrong a lot of the time and still “not lose” (lol).

They think “opinion polls” of other net-losing traders are likely to be reliable.

They are habitual victims of selection bias (this is a big one!).

These are all people who want to reinforce the status-quo-of-belief, however misguided it is.

I could go on but will only attract more criticism and rudeness, probably, if I do.

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I know what you mean. That saddens me, though, because it makes it very difficult to help the few people you can help without annoying some of the much bigger group of people you can’t help (the ones who don’t want their mistaken beliefs to be challenged).

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