The Survivorship Bias Trap in Trading
In 1943, the U.S. military studied bombers coming back from Europe and mapped every bullet hole. The damage clustered on the wings and the tail. The obvious move was to armor those spots.
Abraham Wald, a statistician working the problem, said no. Armor the places with no holes — the engines, the cockpit. The planes shot there never came back. They weren't in the data. The holes the military could see were the survivable ones.
That's the trap in almost every trading success story you've ever read.
When someone tells you they turned $5,000 into $400,000 trading a certain way, you're looking at a returning plane. You're studying the bullet holes that didn't kill it. What you can't see is the crowd of traders who did the exact same thing, took the exact same risks, and got shot through the engine. They don't post threads. They don't sell courses. They...
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