A Monkey By Any Other Name Still Smells Like A Monkey

Recently I met a trader who said that he could predict turning points in the market.  Call me a skeptic.   For every hundred persons who say they can pick turning points or think they can pick turning points I would bet that no more than one actually can with any sort of statistical significance.  Put one hundred monkeys on a trading desk and over a short period of time slightly less then 50% will make money and slightly more than 50% will lose money.  The bias being bad execution (crossing the bid ask) and fees.  As they sit for longer periods of time (if you can keep the winning monkeys from wandering off to start their own hedge funds) the law of large numbers should kick in and each monkey's PnL should converge to the loss due to bias.  I am not saying that no one can do it just that given any reasonably small sample it is hard to figure out which monkey is secretly George Soros and which is...just a monkey.