Ah ha!

This is the fallacy, unfortunately.

Once stocks are public, it's more akin to poker than investing.

Every time you buy a stock, there is someone on the other side, wanting to sell it to you for the same price.

Now, you have to ask yourself the question - why is that person will to part with something that you think is going to be worth more?

If everyone were doing 'value investing' I think there would be a case.

But with day trading, leveraged into option trading ... it's poker. People are 'making bets on stocks' just like they would on horses.

How much you're making right now is not relevant for anything other than your personal bank account, the same way that winning a single hand at the poker table is not relevant for anything except your daily winnings.

What is relevant for the rest of us in this context (since we have no stake in your current bank balance) is this: Will you beat the average professional, or better yet an index fund, over a period of 20 years?

In fact, your personal success over 20 years is just as irrelevant, unless a statistically significant amount of people doing the same thing, as a well defined and replicable strategy, achieves similar success.

"I did this thing and made more money than X" is just noise and not indicative of anything.

P.S. Keeping up with, or even beating, the average professional, is easy: just invest in an index fund. So it's a very low bar to achieve.

In one short sentence, you showed why people are hating on RH.

When you buy or sell a stock (or option or whatever), there is a counterparty to your trade. That person is making the trade because, essentially (in an oversimplified way), they believe the opposite of what you believe regarding the value of the underlying stock. One of you will be wrong. You are precisely "playing against other people", because without those other people, there will be no market.

> If you pick well, then it doesn't really matter if other people (including "pros") pick the same company or not because there's enough future growth for everybody.

While correct, this is shortsighted, and it is precisely why people (rightly or wrongly) suggest investing in an index fund. The issue is that the benchmark for successful investing is beating the general market, not zero. Specifically, if you aren't beating the market or some proxy thereof, you are paying an opportunity cost by investing inefficiently.

Most professional money managers do not beat the market over any reasonable time frame (although they may mitigate certain types of risk relatively effectively), and the folks who sling stocks on RH or TD Ameritrade or whatever also do not beat the market over any reasonable time frame (certainly in aggregrate, and disproportionately true on an individual basis).

> And I have much less reverence towards pros than you.

I actually think this lack of reverence towards the pros is a good thing, but probably not for the reason you think. The pros who exploit less sophisticated counterparties don't advertise this fact very much, if at all -- it is not in their financial best interest to do so.

There is terrible group-think on Wall Street, and there are niche firms that make a killing exploiting this group-think. I consider these niche firms the real "pros".

> While I'm not playing against the pros, I sure am getting better returns than 90% of them.

Your reference time frame is way too short if you actually think this is true. If you think you can scale your returns that beat the market over the long term on a relatively small eight figure fund, you stand to make many millions for yourself, and I recommend you make some friends in the financial world ASAP -- the money will find you. I will bet the don't on your ability to produce market beating results over the long term, since it seems to me that you don't even really understand the basic mechanics of how the market actually works or who the various players actually are.

That said, best of luck.