In the case of trading, removing the known roads to failure is no guarantee that you are now on the road to success. There are many MANY ways to fail in finance

In the case of trading, removing the known roads to failure is no guarantee that you are now on the road to success. There are many MANY ways to fail in finance and more are being invented every day. I suspect (but cannot prove) that this is because financial markets are "PvP" instead of "PvE", you trade against intelligent humans who can and do adapt their strategies to what they observe to be the strategy of other players in the market. If there is any form of rock-paper-scissors dynamic, this means that there will never be a stable strategy that keeps winning and so the method from the article will not work. In most engineering problems OTOH, you are basically fighting against the environment. This can still be very difficult (see rocket science for example) but at least the laws of physics don't change from day to day. So, any progress in solving the problem you made yesterday will remain. Successful application of the TRIZ method requires that the problem remains relatively stable, so that the options you "chip away" remain poor options forever. The markets are not like this and neither, I think, is career design.