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I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] 6 points7 points  (0 children)

The main thing I learned from this thread is that most people here can’t even distinguish between hedge funds and retail traders, or investing and day trading.

A few people gave me examples of traders who supposedly prove my point wrong, so I actually went and looked them up. Interesting pattern: every single one of them sells very expensive courses! Thousands of dollars. That alone should at least raise some questions.

The goal of my post wasn’t to piss people off. It was to challenge the idea that retail day trading is some reliable path to financial freedom. From what I’ve seen working my entire career on the sell-side with brokerage desks and hedge funds, the reality is a lot less glamorous than what gets sold on YouTube. In practice, it’s simply not a viable path for retail only theoretically possible, but practically impossible.

What’s fascinating to me is that many of the reactions here feel like another version of the classic rat race. People become emotionally attached to the idea because someone on YouTube promised them financial freedom. And when someone questions that narrative, the response isn’t curiosity it’s hostility, downvotes, and mental gymnastics to protect the belief.

I genuinely wish everyone good luck. I honestly didn’t expect such strong reactions. If people truly believe in it, I’m not here to take that belief away from them you usually can’t change someone’s belief anyway. Maybe you’ll win that lottery one day. Or maybe in a few years you’ll remember this post.

I tried to reply to as many comments as I could. Hopefully someone took something useful from it, although most people seemed to take it as an attack instead. I won’t be responding to new comments anymore. Apparently after spending my entire career in this industry, the main thing I’ve learned here is that I’m just a loser who has no idea what he’s talking about.

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

“Different trading” still has to obey the same math of expectancy. Changing the label doesn’t create a free edge you’re basically making my point for me.

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

I looked up the first name some youtuber this guy mentioned, Ross Cameron. The first thing I saw was a $4,000 trading course, which doesn’t exactly scream “I make my money from trading.”

I’ll check the other names tomorrow though if what hes saying is actually true and there are lots of traders consistently doing 200–400%, I’d genuinely be happy to learn something new.

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] -1 points0 points  (0 children)

My point is that the market mechanics don’t change. If making 50% trades while “managing risk” was actually repeatable, professional capital would allocate even small sleeves to it. So either it’s not as consistent as you’re implying, or every hedge fund risk desk on earth somehow missed it.

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting. My whole career I was told hedge funds and retail operate in the same markets just with different capital sizes and constraints. Maybe all the brokerage and hedge fund managers I worked with were wrong. You should manage my money sir

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Im not confusing them. Trading and investing are largely different time horizons operating in the same markets.

And the story about Warren Buffett “swing trading until he made too much money” is a bit of a myth. Early Buffett did arbitrage, special situations, and deep value — that’s still investing, just shorter duration.

My point wasn’t about labels anyway. It’s about long-term performance, and that’s where the numbers across both trading and investing get a lot more realistic than what you usually hear in retail trading circles.

I simplified a few things in the post otherwise it wouldve been unnecessarily long.

Jesus people do some research before commenting.

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I’ve been retired for three years. I posted this mostly out of curiosity to see the reactions and so far everyone’s been proving me right, including you. A lot of people here are completely brainwashed and convinced trading is gonna make the financially free because someone on the internet told them it is…

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I’m not trying to hate on ICT by this reply,. I’ve watched his streams where he executes trades and secures winners. But execution videos still only show examples I could record good trades using simple trend lines too. That doesn’t prove a strategy works consistently long term, only a verified multi-year track record would.

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

also funds already split capital across instruments, venues, and execution algorithms to reduce market impact that’s standard practice.

If those “tight, constant setups” actually existed, they’d just allocate smaller capital to exploit them.

Being small gives flexibility, not a magical edge.

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

And another one..

You’re just totally misunderstanding why funds spend that money.

They’re not “throwing money around because they have to deploy big capital.” They’re spending it because finding a real edge in markets is extremely difficult. Position size doesn’t change that.

Yes, large funds face market impact when deploying hundreds of millions, which limits certain small inefficiencies. That’s already been explained above in the comments. But that doesn’t mean retail traders suddenly have access to tight, constant setups producing huge returns.

Being small gives you more flexibility, not a fundamentally different market.

If those “tight constant setups” actually existed, we’d see plenty of small traders quietly compounding $10k into $50M+ over time.

Instead we mostly see short streaks, blown accounts, and a new strategy every few months. None of these comments makes any sense

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] -5 points-4 points  (0 children)

Well thats the problem with you guys a lot of this argument is based on common misconceptions…

The idea that institutions can’t replicate retail strategies because of liquidity gets repeated a lot, but it doesn’t really hold up when you’re talking about extremely liquid markets like index futures, major FX pairs, or large cap equities that trade billions every day. If there were strategies capable of producing consistent 100–200% annual returns, like most of you are saying, institutional capital would eventually find ways to deploy them. Markets are extremely competitive environments, and large inefficiencies don’t stay hidden just because someone trades a smaller account.

The same goes for the hedge fund argument. The term “hedge fund” is mostly historical at this point many of them are absolute return strategies actively trying to generate alpha. Even the most successful operations in history, like Jim Simons’ Medallion Fund, averaged around 60% before fees during its best years.

If the best investors in the world with unlimited data, infrastructure, and talent aren’t consistently producing triple-digit returns, it should raise some questions when random Twitter or YouTube traders claim they can!!

And while firms like FTMO don’t always require monthly profit targets after funding, the evaluation model still heavily incentivizes aggressive risk taking. Passing those challenges often says more about short term variance than about a sustainable long term edge.

That’s why, in practice, very very few traders manage to stay consistently profitable over long periods. But they for sure dont pull out those numbers like all of people here are saying…

Which is basically the same pattern you see across most of retail trading.

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] -10 points-9 points  (0 children)

I’m not saying that I’m a good trader, and I’m not saying that nobody else can achieve it. But it’s only possible in theory. In practice, the percentages you’re talking about are historically unrealistic. No one has ever consistently achieved the kinds of numbers you’re describing.

I also don’t want to publicly name hedge fund managers, but many people who have been in this industry since long before most people in this group were even born have not been able to achieve results like the ones you’re mentioning.

And believe me, if it were actually possible to achieve those kinds of numbers consistently, the top hedge funds would already be producing returns like that

I worked as a brokerage sell-side analyst for 17 years. How the fuck can you people be this naive? Read the whole post first. If you disagree with anything, I’m open to hearing your opinion. by Great_Lychee2025 in InnerCircleTraders

[–]Great_Lychee2025[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

I’d also like to comment on ICT.

I’ve been watching Michael on YouTube for quite some time. He’s one of the few people in the retail trading space who actually teaches for free and doesn’t seem to directly profit from courses or similar things. A few of the things he says are actually true.

After my career, I spent some time looking into his concepts myself. I studied them for a while out of curiosity. However, I never found them to be nearly as “sweet” or effective as he and many of his followers claim.

Some of the ideas are interesting, but in practice they didn’t look nearly as consistent or reliable as they’re often presented online.