I used to trade options and had about 99.5% success on all my trades The problem is the 0.5% of the time, it erases all the gains made on the successful ones. I'm convinced without information edge or some capital sunk cost edge (for HFT) you are literally just flipping coins when it comes to trading. What's dangerous is fixation on strategies that form after a period of success. All in all, I think just buying stock…
Had a period in my college days where I had a neural network running that could successfully trade on patterns of periodicity of non-chaotic windows of the asset. But as soon as the system would go back to being chaotic, and there was no way to identify WHEN the system was chaotic and when it wasn't, the trades would go to shit and I would lose all gains. I was up about 400-450% at an end of a successful cycle, which was 2-4 months, and then it could be a year of decline with gains being eaten up by the option issuers.
Now I only do long-term funds/stocks and have:
a) much less anxiety about losses b) more money.