"We’re going to look back at a generation of successful founders and VCs with the realization that all of their talent was in creating a company during the bull market." - random tweet I came across that's very relevant here.
Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb
https://www.amazon.com/Fooled-Randomness-Hidden-Markets-Ince...
It's literally about how options traders and the like can be lucky for 10 or 20 years, but they are actually idiots who destroy the economy.
They think they are skilled, and others think they are skilled, but it's luck. You can also call it "anti-luck" because their short-term actions can cause the long-term crisis.
This book was a #1 best seller, as were most of Taleb's books, but for some reason whenever I mention it to anybody, I get blank stares.
I think it's just really hard for people to understand phenomena that occur at time scales of say more than a decade.
(BTW Another good book about recurring economic cycles is Dalio's 2022 The Changing World Order. All of this stuff has happened before. This is separate from crypto, and relates to the global economic environment.)
Maybe it's the circles you move in. In finance nobody hasn't heard of it.
Well deserved reputation too, it really changed how I saw things. It's weird because even as someone who studied probability and stats, I hadn't thought it would change my entire worldview.
I don't see how doing anything successfully (in this case, gaining profit?) for 20 years can be described as "luck." Surviving/being successful that long trading isn't a fluke.
I haven't read the book, but I know that Talib talks about 'tail risk' a lot and 'risk of ruin'. Which are very different than what you describe. If my bet size is only limited to 2%, I would be happy to be "lucky" for 20 years!
If that tweeter has done something wrong in his life, then talk about it. But he didn't really have a choice on who birthed him.
From the wiki page:
> Some of his children were resentful that he gave them no special privileges and treated their mothers poorly.
Someone like him not born to such father in Nigeria, will likely be an high school teacher getting paid $100 every 4 months.
There are a quarter of a million immigrants from Nigeria in the US.
[0]: https://travel.state.gov/content/dam/visas/Statistics/Immigr...
This is like saying every great sailor happened to sail when the wind was blowing in the right direction.