I think it’s more down to adverse selection… while some really smart people might be making decent returns via technical analysis or whatever, they’ll never disclose their strategies since someone else could frontrun them. Instead, the only strategies we get exposed to are the ones that don’t work, since the best way to make money on a strategy that doesn’t work is to find someone to sell it to. Like - it’s clearly possible to make money trading, because a very small amount of people seem to be able to do so somewhat reliably. But if someone is trying to sell you a trading course, they’re almost certainly more of a scam artist than a genius trading savant.