I can see how what I meant could be taken the wrong way. What I meant is that you can learn 90% of what you need to know about the mechanics of investment finan

I can see how what I meant could be taken the wrong way. What I meant is that you can learn 90% of what you need to know about the mechanics of investment finance in a year. The rest of your career is spent cultivating relationships so that people allow you to handle large sums of money for them. The "skill" involved in trading isn't really that difficult to learn - it's tradecraft, which you have to learn in any industry. And you're right; the math whiz fresh out of college doesn't get a ton of money to play with. He gets a small amount and if he does well, is progressively trusted with more. The bulk of this type of trading is about risk balancing. Institutional traders will make more money here simply because they trade using proprietary platforms that get simply them better prices on securities. The algo guys optimize the ordering systems such that the prop traders get first pick at everything. Trading at high levels (billion dollar positions and above) is a lot like poker; but the bulk of securities trading is really no different than playing a video game. I used to know a guy who worked for a big HFT firm, and that's exactly how he described it. Humans are excellent at pattern recognition, and so the HFT guys use humans to make decisions about when to get in/out of an asset. Computer programs show patterns to the analysts, who issue a "yes/no" decision and who are judged solely on their performance. But yes, you are also right that mere mortals like us have no chance because it's not an even playing field. I mean, the algo traders pay millions of dollars a year to get Reuters feeds 60 seconds early, so by the time news hits the market, the price has already adjusted. Hell, the trading platforms that are processing your orders sell access to their incoming order feed, and the algo traders love to pre-empt your trades to drive the price up. A more apt definition would be that trading is like poker where the guys with huge piles of chips also have X-ray vision. And they get to skim the pot even when they lose. If you have X-ray vision and pot-skimming rights, then yeah, it's just poker. If you don't, then you should just go play Blackjack (i.e. buy-and-hold investment where you play against the market as a whole, not any individual players).