Not to mention huge quant firms that paid more than 4x your salary just to get a trading latency advantage

If you understand finance and aren’t specifically attempting to arb on that timescale, you actually want to participate in markets with those participants, because their presence gives you less variance/better price discovery on the scales that don’t factor into your decisions to buy and sell things.

So basically if you’re larping as a trader you will consistently get your ass handed to you unless you are genuinely better than all the pros, but if you’re investing or optimizing for a specific risk profile/exposure/timeline you’re playing a different game.

Anyway the fact that it’s so hard to explain this stuff to individuals does strengthen the argument that most individuals are better off following the herd.