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People winning the lottery (what is it already? 1 chance in 300 millions ?) must be very good at lottery.



Did you not read the other comments in this thread talking about the numbers?

The probability of repeatedly beating the market the way Buffett has done it is several orders of magnitude lower than the probability of winning the lottery. That's the point.


Now win it 40 times in a row.


Not comparable - beating the market one year is quite probable.


Your analogy is a poor comparison. Winning the lottery is not like picking stocks because it's almost perfectly efficient. No player in a lottery has any insight about what the winning numbers will be that, let alone an insight that other players don't have. It's an absolute black box.

I know what you're thinking. "The stock market is a random walk! Efficient market hypothesis!" But the market is not a black box. You can legally gain insight that other participants don't have and use that insight to profit.

Other people have done the math in this thread. The human population would need to be orders of magnitude larger than it is now, and every human would need to be an active, failing market participant, in order for the successful traders we see being the result of chance.




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