All those who have truly made big money share one ironclad rule:

They don’t make money by predicting, but by losing very little when they’re wrong.

The person with the highest prediction accuracy is often the first to go bust.
One of the most striking conversations from his book:

A reporter asked a legendary CTA who hadn’t lost in 30 years: “What trading operation are you most proud of?”

He replied: “In 2008, I was wrong 37 times in a row, but those 37 times only lost me 4% total, and then on the 38th time I made 187%.”

The brutal truth about trading:

In your whole life, you might only catch 3–5 truly massive market moves.

And whether you survive depends on whether you managed to keep your underwear on during those hundreds of small mistakes before that.

If you can keep your losses painful but not fatal, and let time and compounding do the rest, you’re already at the top of the food chain.

—The ultimate commonality that repeatedly appears in Jack Schwager’s “Market Wizards” series, where he interviewed hundreds of top traders with 30%+ annual returns