Comment by majormajor

The headline is often accurate IME... but this whole extension to betting and investment is silly. Noisiest places to look for patterns in the world.

Where I think pattern matching is essential is in debugging. Software is the easy one to explain, but problem-solving in life in general, too.

An experienced dev who's operated some systems can see odd behavior and be like "ah, feels like a race condition between X and Y" far faster than anyone could construct the narrative of that root cause from first principles.

But good luck doing that for a several decades in the financial markets... Maybe you don't go broke, but... there's a a whole lot of dumb strategies that can work better than average for a while, and it's actually pretty hard to do so devastatingly bad that you question your ability if you think you're the pattern-matching investor genius.

And the shot at index funds are silly. The beauty of index funds is that they raised the floor and stability for the average middle-income+ person investing for their future vs speculating to try to get a big edge. While bleeding less to overpaid advisors. That's real value, regardless of if some people do better or if you believe that you can consistently do better.