another contributory factor is that some quite long-standing members are actually idiots. In fact there are quite alot of idiots across the whole spectrum, far many more than you find in a group of actual traders. Not book-smart, or people-smart, but for want of better word, "street-smart". For instance it should have been obvious to anyone with a bit of common sense that Howard did not have any edge in his strategy. There was absolutley no scope for an edge to exist in the first place. You don't need to know about options to see it, it should have been intuitive.
Yet another problem is that most people here seem to have signed up to the idea that in order to suuceed at trading, all you need to do is find a strategy with a positive edge and follow it properly, and so they spend hundreds and hundreds of hours researching for an edge that they can then turn into tens of thousands of dollars, rather that accepting that an edge is something you have to LEARN.
