Text | Layman Wu En Pictures | From the Internet I have spent three years learning to trade stocks. During this period, I have read a lot of books and videos, as well as hundreds of e-books and forum posts.

However, if you follow the methods in books, videos, and posts from masters, you can make profits in the short term, but it is difficult to make stable profits in the long term.

Of course, I figured it out later, not that their methods were wrong, but because these methods were theirs, not mine.

They use dragon-slaying knives, but what I have to do is find my own unique dagger.

I still remember what a great master on the Tianya Forum said. He said that to achieve stable profits (meaning stable growth of funds) in the capital market, according to statistics, it takes at least 8 years on average.

It’s just buying low and selling high, why is it so difficult?

When I was learning how to trade stocks, I watched the reality show "Million Dollar Trader" broadcast by the British Broadcasting Company BBC in 2009.

The program was designed by Lex van Dam, an international financial celebrity, hedge fund manager, and financial educator.

The show will examine Richard Dennis' famous turtle trading experiment in the 1980s.

The entire project takes place in London, England.

After interviews, 8 contestants were selected to participate in "Million Dollar Trader".

These 8 players are ordinary people with no or little trading experience.

They are: a boxing boot; a fighter; a shopkeeper; a veterinarian; a single mother; a retired engineer and a student.

Lex taught the eight contestants about the stock market and offered them the equivalent of one million U.S. dollars in pounds to engage in real-life stock trading for two months.

Of course, the exciting thing is the process.

After a very short period of training, these would-be traders "learned" and were ready to go into battle to "kill the enemy."

As a result, within two days, they were tortured by the market and lost all confidence.

What I remember most clearly is a girl who was so shocked that she was at a loss because of continuous losses. Her hands even shook when she placed an order on the keyboard, and she finally broke down and cried.

There is no doubt that those who could not bear the pressure left one after another, and in the end only a handful of people remained.

Two months later, The Million Dollar Trader reached the same conclusion as The Turtle Trading Experiment: People with little or no trading experience could become professional-level traders—even then

Affected by the global financial crisis, players trained by Lex also performed better than professional traders.

The question is, since inexperienced people can reach professional trading levels after short-term training, why is the elimination rate so high and making profits so difficult?

Because the capital market has a reasonable and legal ecological chain in which big fish eat small fish, and follows the cruel jungle law of the weak and the strong. More importantly and the most critical point is that the capital market is a "colosseum" that infinitely magnifies the weaknesses of human nature.

If you are greedy, your greed will be magnified to the limit: so when you reach the closing point, you will think it will rise and be reluctant to sell, eventually causing the capital curve to get out of control.

Many times, you will give back your original profit, or even end up with a loss; your fear will also be infinitely magnified: after experiencing a liquidation (a planned small loss), you will be even more afraid the second time, leading to unsatisfactory results.

Dare to enter hastily, miss good opportunities, or cause the holding period to be too short and not make the planned profits; Obviously, if traders are controlled by these two human weaknesses, their behavior will deviate from the plan or even completely lose control - no matter what you are ahead of

No matter how much you make, if you lose control of your behavior once, you will spit out all your previous profits, and even cause huge losses.

Wall Street legend and trading master Jesse Livermore said as early as the beginning of the last century: I discovered very early on that there is nothing new on Wall Street, and there can be nothing new, because the history of speculation is as old as the mountains.

Everything that is happening in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again in the future.

That's exactly what happened.

Nowadays, many people studying trading regard his book as the investment bible, and draw rich nutrition from it that can "use the past for today".

Why is this happening?

Because the capital market is the most profound and immediate reflection of people’s greed, anger, and ignorance. Those curves are actually the game of people’s greed, anger, and ignorance in the capital market.

Human nature has never changed, so those curves will always be so winding, so ups and downs, so elusive, and they also show certain rising and falling patterns that can be used as research specimens.

This is the reason: the competition in the capital market is about controlling the weaknesses of human nature. Whoever can control themselves better will win.

This also shows how difficult it is to control the dark side of human nature.