The human lifespan is too short to distinguish between luck and skill for most low frequency traders. You'd have to see dozens of potential pandemics as severe

The human lifespan is too short to distinguish between luck and skill for most low frequency traders. You'd have to see dozens of potential pandemics as severe as this one to know if you were "right". But it's empirically true that the average active trader underperforms the market. I build short-term trading strategies at my day job, but at home I just buy and hold some boring vanilla index funds. One nice thing about higher-frequency trading is that you have enough statistical power to quickly see lots of "obvious" ideas fail miserably. It teaches humility.