Forget the charts for a moment. Look at the math.

Trading is not just zero-sum. It is negative-sum.

Zero-sum means every dollar you make comes directly from another participant’s pocket. For you to profit, someone else must lose. No company grows because you bought a contract from someone else. No productivity increases. No innovation happens. Just a transfer of capital from one account to another.

But the situation is worse than zero-sum because every trade carries costs that leak profit from the system entirely: commissions to brokers. Bid-ask spreads paid to market makers. Slippage from imperfect execution. Exchange fees. Data fees. Platform costs. Technology infrastructure. These costs are explicit and unavoidable.