Kris: I believe you may be optimistic here. My sample: 1. Retail: during my last gardening, I called out to successful retail traders (I posted criteria) and spoke to ~30 of them, some very famous, from deep value, to tactical intraday, factor timers, arbitrageurs, shorting experts. 2. HF: dunno, maybe 200PMs, maybe a bit more, just in L/S equities. In total, embarrassingly many. And I mean, seeing their actual, true, pnl, not the “audited track record”. End of flex. My findings: the *only* “retail” investor I would have given my own money to was essentially a professional, no huge social media profile, teaching exec investment courses in a top-tier uni. He is definitely a clever arb trader, and with some opportunistic fundamental analysis abilities. He’d be employable at a good HF. Actually, I don’t think he’s strictly retail. But in any case, the “finest” traders on the planet in either class in a good HF are just very, *very* different animals. I am comparing to a HF population. Institutional managers are (mostly) drawn from a different set. What’s the moral? If things are really so bad, my recommendation to you is that you just barely keep a pulse. Don’t even time, don’t concentrate. You’ll beat the mostest people; you’ll beat the market makers who buy your flow. You’ll beat the RH peddlers. The almost-dead can beat most of the living. And being investing-but-almost-dead in finance, you can use the freed time to actually live irl. Eat with frens, greet strangers in the street, or fall in love.