"Not dumber, just more meta-ignorant"

I don’t start many threads, here, but I think the article linked to, below, is highly relevant to “trading mistakes” and that we can all learn something from it …

[“At five-foot-six and 270 pounds, the bank robber was impossible to miss. On April 19, 1995, he hit two Pittsburgh banks in broad daylight. Security cameras picked up good images of his face — he wore no mask — and showed him holding a gun to the teller. Police made sure the footage was broadcast on the local eleven o’clock news. A tip came in within minutes, and just after midnight, the police were knocking on the suspect’s door in McKeesport. Identified as McArthur Wheeler, he was incredulous. “But I wore the juice,” he said. Wheeler told police he rubbed lemon juice on his face to make it invisible to security cameras. Detectives concluded he was not delusional, not on drugs — [B][U]just incredibly mistaken[/U][/B].”]

My contention is that the preponderance of internet “information” about trading, largely promotionally orientated, with its lack of any kind of quality control, is making many of us believe things that simply aren’t true, in any sense of objective, verifiable validity - with the overall effect that many traders have deluded belief-patterns about processing trades.

[B]How the Dunning-Kruger Effect Explains Our Ignorance Today – Science of Us[/B]

Any thoughts/observations?

Interesting article! Seems the essence of the issue lies in this quote:

“The Dunning-Kruger effect requires a minimal degree of knowledge and experience in the area about which you are ignorant[B] (and ignorant of your ignorance).[/B]”

Point seems to be that a little information and experience is sufficient to convince oneself that one knows a lot more than one actually does - [I]but one also needs to be unaware of this.[/I]

Quite interesting…I picked this conversation from one of the “similar threads” mentioned dated back in 2009:

OP: [I]“I have little or no knowledge of forex markets, i can make trades using buy now sell now and no more settings than that. I’ve made 7 trades in the last 30 minutes and all have had a profit and im up over 200$…The thing i need to know is… is this just luck… Or if you watch the graph at a minute level and basically buy and keep hold of your trade until it goes into profit and then close it, is that just a smart way of making a few quid?”[/I]

To which came the response:

[I]“the more you learn the harder you will find it - perhaps if you just keep your knowledge at that level it could turn into a winning system”[/I]

Shame that the OP’s post count stopped at 2. I really would have liked to hear how he/she progressed…

Interesting article. I agree with you but people are also just plain stupid sometimes.
Exploitative, shameless, unethical - you can call the industry what you want but market makers know they have an edge and it is in their favor big time! Without the experience and screen time new traders are pretty much guaranteed to lose their initial deposit.
Also people are just not interested in learning properly. I started that way, skim reading through heaps of articles, posts, trade ideas…to try and find something that would work. It doesn’t help that people tend to shout out about their winning trades but you dont really hear about the losers. Reminds of something funny I read somewhere - when youre pregnant people always congratulate you but nobody asks how many attempts it took to fall pregnant (I put that as politely as I could, the rude version is a lot funnier).

Turns out this is a patience game. More quality less quantity. People are lured in with the promise of easy money and it can be easy but the problem lies in the journey we all have to take. The market has to break you and then mould you before have earned the right to extract money from it. Most don’t get past the ‘break’ phase. Enter the market makers…