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.
This isn’t about intelligence. 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 isn’t just important—it’s everything. 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.
But trading operates by completely different rules. Even highly successful traders are wrong 40-50% of the time. What separates winners from losers isn’t the frequency of being right—it’s the magnitude 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. So they hold losing positions, hoping to be proven right eventually.
“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-concept. You’re not just competent. You’re exceptional. And that exceptionalism starts to feel transferable.
When you approach trading, it’s natural to assume those same qualities will carry over.
They don’t—at least not automatically.
This breeds a particular kind of arrogance.
The unspoken assumption is that intelligence is domain-independent. 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.
The Takeaway
None of this means doctors and lawyers can’t become successful traders. The real lesson here isn’t about doctors or lawyers specifically. It’s about anyone approaching trading: your prior success, your intelligence, your credentials—none of these protect you from the market. In fact, they might be liabilities if they fill you with false confidence.
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.