[Mistletoe]

It will be interesting if it repeats. He may just be a guy that existed in one of the most privileged eras in human history for making money like that, like a colonist writing a book about how easy it is to get free land in America.

https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/

[oh_sigh]

If it was just luck, shouldn't we expect a bunch of billionaires who followed a similar easy path?

[jilko]

Not necessarily. For the record I'm in the camp "they didn't just get lucky," but it's totally plausible to argue that they did.

Taleb does this exact thought experiment in "Fooled By Randomness." He imagines a pool of investors who are weeded out purely by random luck each iteration of some process. You still end up with people that get some insane track records, purely by chance. In fact, he spends quite a bit of the book talking about barely fictionalized people he knew in the trading world whose strategies made money for long periods of time before blowing up simply because they happened to be in the market at the right time.

I suspect the nuance we need to add to OP's comment was "they were there at the right time AND won the iteration game purely by luck." So they were the tippy top of a cohort in a generally advantaged time where their strategy happened to be optimal. Again I don't personally think that's the case (I believe there's something more fundamentally correct in their approach), but it's a totally reasonable thing to argue even in the absence of other examples.

[Mistletoe]

I wish I could find it again but I can’t, but there was a fascinating applet kind of thing that showed even with perfectly equal odds starting out after it runs for a while you see some of the bars start accumulating wealth and it does not end up evenly distributed. It’s actually quite skewed at the end with a top class that accumulated most of the wealth. It taught me a lot about the rich and how they got there and how much I should listen to their advice. Now I’m not saying the rich don’t make smart moves, because some certainly do, but even in a completely equal world we would still have some people that didn’t do anything at all except be lucky get to that tier. I do think there are things you can massively do to increase your odds such as saving, investing intelligently using compound interest, not buying crap you don’t need, not get divorced, invest in your health, work hard, etc.