I suspect you’re more optimistic than I am about how many LWers would make good traders.
I started investing as a hobby in 1980, and alternated between trading and software jobs up through 1999 before getting good enough at trading to give low priority to seeking non-trading jobs. I averaged a bit over 15% per year over the 20 year period ending in 2018, and over 35% per year since then (pretax).
You seem to be implying that people can determine within a year or so of starting whether they’re good at trading. I think it’s complex enough that it’s hard to say how much time it takes.
Some people will do great for a few years, then go broke spectacularly (mostly people with ADHD? my intuition says you’re not going to fail this way, but maybe 1⁄3 of LWers who try trading might do so).
Your list of tips is mostly good.
Tip 7 seems close to being an important piece of advice, but my version of this advice focuses less on who, and more on why a person on the other side of a trade appears to disagree with me (keeping in mind Aumann-like reasons, plus the wisdom of crowds phenomenon).
I often ask my self questions like:
could most traders be wrong here due to availability bias? (e.g. underestimating pandemic risks when the last 6 or so pandemic scares were false alarms; overestimating how much the pandemic would hurt profits during the worst times)
Is the chart consistent with the hypothesis that traders are reacting to news that I haven’t noticed?
I expect that tip 2 downplays too much the difficulty of distinguishing competent experts. It’s been a long time since I put much thought into identifying expert commentators, but I expect that most LWers will make a fair number of mistakes here, and take a year or two to recognize those mistakes.
I recommend looking at commentators as a source of data, but doing your best to not believe anything that could reasonably be classified as an opinion rather than a fact. That includes opinions about what topics deserve attention.
I strongly advise would-be traders to balance that out by reading a lot of earnings reports (mostly the presentations that are publicized by the companies, with an occasional glance at SEC filings). These reports have a higher fact to opinion ratio, mainly because they run a higher risk of being sued if they say something misleading. But it’s still important to ignore their opinions about which facts deserve your attention.
Earnings reports are also important as a means of prompting you to learn enough about accounting.
Studying financial history seems important, as some important phenomena happen only a couple of times per century.
When I was getting started, Value Line was an important source of information, because it provided about 18 years of fundamental data on many stocks in a convenient format (a trial subscription should be all you need to get a better historical prespective than most investors).
I use Stock Investor Pro to download a large amount of fundamental data.
Some relevant books:
The book Noise by Daniel Kahneman et al sometimes uses the terms statistical thinking and causal thinking as substitutes for outside and inside views.
These terms seem better at reminding me what the categories are meant to be, and why evolution prepared us less for one of them. But they still leave some confusion about how to draw the boundary between the concepts.