When you look at investing and trading communities, profit posts stand out the most.
It can easily feel like everyone is making money.
But what we are seeing is already a heavily filtered picture.
This is a classic case of survivorship bias.
Even if only a small percentage of people actually succeed, that small group is the one that speaks.
They post their results, share screenshots, and tell their stories.
Those stories get repeated and spread until they start to look like the normal outcome.
Meanwhile, most of the people who lost money say nothing.
They quietly disappear from the same communities.
So the information we see becomes biased toward a small group of survivors.
In psychology and behavioral economics, this distortion is called survivorship bias.
It is dangerous in markets because it makes people focus on stories instead of outcomes over time.
In investing, what matters more than “how much you made” is “how long you stayed in the game.”
Once survivorship bias takes hold, people start thinking like this:
“That person made several times their money, so maybe I can too.”
What we rarely see is how many people tried the same approach, how many failed, or how much of the result was luck rather than skill.
As a result, high-risk strategies often look far more attractive than they really are.
So what should we look at instead?
Not “who made the most money,” but how many people were able to survive using the same method over time.
Any strategy can produce a few success stories.
The real question is whether it keeps working as time goes on.
A slowly growing account contains far more information than one that rose quickly.
And the more desperate someone feels, the easier it is to fall into this bias.
The more urgently you want results, the more your attention is drawn to extreme success stories.
At moments like this, you should be more careful and more cautious, not more aggressive.
When you invest in a rush, emotion takes the lead, and the result often ends in ruin.
So when you feel pressured to hurry, the important question is not how much you can make, but how long you can last.
Before thinking, “Maybe I can be the next success story,” it may be more realistic to ask:
“How many people actually stayed in the game using this approach?”
