"I thought trading strategies work best if you have your own unique strategy that is better than others, AND no one else has it. Otherwise, you are just buying and selling at the same time as others." The reality is that many profitable trading strategies aren't secret at all; they're well-documented and widely known (of course you can always tweak here and there). For the most part, they're harvesting risk premia: you get compensated for taking on risks that others aren't willing or able to bear. Most people think trading is always about finding some hidden alpha. But that's not realistic for most people. The idea that you'll discover some pattern or inefficiency that thousands of well-funded quants, institutional traders, and algorithms haven't already found and arbitraged away is, for most people, a fantasy. For most traders, chasing alpha is a distraction. The money is made by systematically taking on risks that the market will pay you to absorb. It's less about outsmarting everyone and more about having the risk tolerance to step in where others won't.