Trading: The Casino and the Course Business

I believed

The five Ichimoku lines, the cloud shading in, nights spent drawing "flats" on charts. The promise was beautiful: a method, a little discipline, and the market reads like a book. I read, I drew, I watched. I wanted to believe.

The doubt came from a simple question, the one no one dares ask: does it actually work? Not "does it look like it works on yesterday's chart," but: applied mechanically, over decades, does it beat simply staying invested? I ended up coding the whole thing and testing it. The answer was uncomfortable — for me first of all.

The house never loses

Start with the fact that's best documented and least discussed: on the speculative products sold to the general public, the vast majority of retail accounts lose money, year after year. Not an unlucky few. The majority.

So where does the money go? To the ones who never bet. The broker and the market maker — the one who sells you your positions and buys them back, pocketing the gap — collect on volume, on the difference between the buy price and the sell price, and, for leveraged products (staking with borrowed money, which amplifies losses), on the share of clients who lose. This is the casino model: the house doesn't play, it runs the table. The market's real winners — the professionals — don't have a chart edge. They have speed, information, capital, structure. Nothing a retail trader can buy in a course. → Who Actually Makes Money at Trading.

The method doesn't survive the test

I put Ichimoku on the test bench, then the other stars the courses tout — RSI, MACD, stochastic… their names hardly matter. The verdict repeats, indicator after indicator: the sophisticated version doesn't beat simply staying invested, and every layer of complexity takes value away. What keeps a little edge is the crudest signal — today's price above or below its average of the last few months. In other words, what stays useful is exactly what has nothing secret left about it. → Ichimoku on the test bench.

And tax finishes off the rest

Suppose even a thin edge survives. One last wall awaits it: tax. Every winning round-trip books its gain — and so pays tax right away; the one who holds pays only at the end. Over time, the money handed to the tax authority on every trade stops working. The meager edge active trading had left vanishes. → The tax on churn.

The real business is hope

One question turns it all over: if a method worked, why sell it rather than trade it? The answer lies in the nature of a short-term edge. It's fragile. Push it to a thousand subscribers who all pile into the same entry, and it dies. An edge sold in bulk destroys itself in the selling. So the "monthly subscription" format selects, by design, for the absence of an edge.

The course seller, on the other hand, does have a steady, robust income. But it doesn't come from the markets. It comes from you. What you're being sold isn't a method. It's the hope of having one.

What this reading doesn't do

It doesn't predict the markets. It doesn't claim no human wins by trading: some do, through risk management and discipline, never through the indicator alone. It recommends no purchase, no sale, no investment. These are historical results and a reading of market structure; past performance does not predict the future.

Takeaways

Go further

• Ichimoku on the test bench — what backtesting says about trading methods.
• Who Actually Makes Money at Trading — the house, the seller, the structural professional.
• The tax on churn — why taxation finishes off active trading.
• The Cap Nord Manifesto — invest to endure, not to be right.