A big investment guru once said something that now feels particularly realistic.

Retail investors and institutions have already fallen behind in three dimensions—capital, information channels, and research depth. But the real nightmare began after the widespread adoption of quantitative trading. This gap hasn't been narrowed; it has been completely widened.

Your previous opponents were living, breathing humans with emotions, doubts, and the tendency to make mistakes. Now, it's different. You're facing data models, trading algorithms, and stacked computing power. They monitor the market 24/7, without emotions or fatigue, specifically studying the trading patterns of retail investors like you.

You're still pondering whether to enter the market, but they've already completed the entire calculation process. When you follow the trend and rush in, they instantly counter. Just as you think, "This round of the market is different," the system has already categorized you as a certain type of person in historical data, and the classification is complete.

The key is, this is fundamentally not something that effort can remedy. Learning more technical indicators or studying candlestick patterns is useless because you're essentially on an unfair playing field that's been set up.

Those who truly want to understand won't be foolish enough to compete with machines in speed or to deadlock in short-term battles. The smart approach is to find opportunities that quantitative models can't see through, that big institutions overlook but can be proven over time. In a game where "who has stronger computing power makes money," the real fatal flaw for retail investors isn't ignorance, but the false confidence that they still have a chance.