survivorship
The graveyard is silent
The rule
Winners post screenshots and shout. The wiped-out go quiet and leave. So a wall of success stories is a false picture.
Where it flips
Survivors do not prove nothing at all. A method with some real winners may still have an edge. The fix is to ask for the full list, wins and losses together, before treating the visible winners as the whole story.
In the war, Wald saw returning planes shot in spots that did not need more armour. Why? The planes hit in other spots never came back to be counted. Trading crowds are the same. Accounts that doubled money shout loudly. Accounts that blew up delete their posts. Judging a method by the winners you see counts only the planes that came home.
A worked example
A group chat is full of members sharing multibagger screenshots from the same options strategy. The dozens who lost all their money on the very same strategy just left the chat quietly. So the survivors make a losing method look like a winning one. [illustrative]
How to spot it
- ·only profit screenshots ever shared
- ·no count of how many tried and failed
- ·losers quietly gone from the group
- ·a method judged by its loudest winner
Abraham Wald · WWII Statistical Research Group