Why Doctors and Lawyers Make Bad Traders
They conquered medicine and law. Then the market humbled them.
Some of the smartest, most successful professionals such as doctors and lawyers often make terrible traders. Not just mediocre. Terrible.
Obviously it’s not about intelligence because these are people who conquered medical programs and passed the bar exam. So what gives?
The “being right” Problem
In medicine and law, being correct all the time is critical.
A surgeon can’t be right 60% of the time and call it a good year. A lawyer who loses half their cases isn’t celebrating their win rate. So they adopt a mindset in which being wrong is unacceptable.
But trading operates by completely different rules. Even highly successful traders may be wrong 40-50% of the time. What separates winners from losers isn’t the frequency of being right, it’s the size of wins versus losses. You can be right three times and wrong seven times and still make money if your three wins are big enough.
For professionals trained to be right, this feels wrong at a visceral level. Cutting a loss and admitting you were mistaken—not once in a while, but regularly—runs counter to everything their training taught them.
“I’m Smart Enough to Figure This Out”
When you’ve spent your career being the smartest person in the room (when patients trust you with their lives, when clients pay you $800 an hour for your judgment, when colleagues defer to your expertise) you develop a certain self-exceptionalism.
When you approach trading, it’s natural to assume those same qualities will carry over.
They don’t.
People assume that being brilliant at one complex thing means you’ll naturally excel at any other complex thing you attempt.
But trading isn’t like switching from cardiac surgery to orthopedics. The foundational skills are completely different.
What makes this particularly dangerous is that beginner’s luck (which is a real thing reinforces the delusion). A few good trades, and they think they’ve figured it out.
Then the market humbles them. Hard.
Beyond Doctors and Lawyers
This phenomenon is not limited to doctors or lawyers. It’s about anyone approaching trading: your prior success, your intelligence, your credentials…none of these will protect you from the market.
The market is a great equalizer. It doesn’t care about your résumé. It only cares whether you can manage risk, control your emotions, and admit when you’re wrong.
And that’s a skill set that has nothing to do with your MCAT score.
Why Professionals Prefer to Allocate to CI Volatility
This is one reason many physicians, attorneys, and other specialists ultimately choose to invest with firms like CI Volatility rather than attempt to manage markets on their own.
Our approach is built on quantitative signals, volatility-based regime analysis, and rigorous risk control tools designed specifically to navigate the kinds of uncertainty that make trading difficult for individuals with demanding careers and limited time.