That's not how math works.

Buffet has been "flipping heads" consecutively for several decades, with no regression to the mean.

Buffet is now a poor example; Berkshire Hathaway has many structural advantages that no individual investor, and almost no institutional investors can exploit.

There are many articles on this: https://www.forbes.com/sites/adamhartung/2014/11/19/why-you-...

Some info I gained from when I last read some of Buffett's annual letters: (1) He said he likes the insurance business (Gen RE, Geico) as it gives him money to use; (2) He doesn't like to use that money to buy shares, he likes to buy the whole of solid, multi-million family businesses e.g. furniture businesses; (3) He encourages the previous owners & management to stay on and run the business; (4) He doesn't pay dividends - so you aren't going to get that regular income by investing in Berkshire Hathaway; (5) If he buys shares, he intends to hold those shares for decades, e.g. American Express and Coca-Cola (he now owns about 10% of each); (6) He constantly warns that he might lose substantial amounts through insurance payouts. How much will he lose through the damage done this hurricane season? A list of his present holdings: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_assets_owned_by_Berksh...

Just to fawn over Buffett and Berkshire assets a bit more. Coca Cola and Amex are part of his original big four, along with Wells Fargo and IBM. Amex is the highest percentage ownership while Wells Fargo is the biggest investment in dollars. More recently he has had 3 new huge investments come in, they all exceed some of his four in value. Bank of America (about as much percent as IBM), Apple (only 2-3% but that adds up to a ton), and Kraft Heinz (over 25%) or whatever they call themselves now. That's his biggest major stake now, but a bit different as he worked with 3G of Brazil to first buy Heinz, then merge with the bigger Kraft.

And even more recently he did the cool thing of being a top or the top shareholder of the big 3-4 airline companies in America: United, Delta, American, Southwest.

There have also been some pretty big complete buy outs this century. Two come to mine. One being some manufacturing company. Another being a rail company. Both buyouts were in the low tens of billions. And then Gen Re insurance as mentioned above was no small thing either.

Buffet has lost money on his bets before. Not all tosses are heads, just most of them.

There's also the fact that winning enough coin tosses gives one the ability to improve the odds on subsequent tosses. Buffet is perspicacious and patient, yes - but when you add that he has a $100B float to play with, you've really got something!

Virtu and others (that aren’t as public, some of which i’ve Worked for) flip coins in the order of 1,000,000 times a day, and have had less than 30 days of losses in 15 years; if you believe that this is pure luck then I suspect we cannot reach any agreement.

Virtu trades 3 million shares a day, they are way out on the bell curve in terms of statistical significance.

There are of course many risks to their business model, e.g. high fixed costs, competition, regulatory risk, technical malfunctions, etc.

They are "lucky" to be in a position to capitalize on the opportunity, but investment luck does not play a role on a day to day basis.

Virtu trades far more than 3 million shares a day. They may even make 3 million trades a day.

If you've seen a system like this in action, it's a beautiful thing to behold and cannot be mere luck. Transactions stream in constantly. It's not just one big, lucky bet, but thousands of tiny bets with a slight edge. A plot of profit & loss with respect to time looks like an almost perfectly smooth upward line. And if you're good, you can do this every single day for years and years.

Still, I wouldn't say guys like that have beaten the market in a real way. I've certainly never felt like I did. This style of trading doesn't need outside capital and can't scale. If I gave you $100 and armed you with a scalping bot, I bet you could easily turn it into $200 buying hot tickets on Ticketmaster and reselling them. But would anyone call you a genius trader? Could you do it with a million? A billion?

As a business net of all costs like employee compensation and technology, returns to owners are pretty lousy. Compare owning Virtu stock to an index fund since their IPO. Ouch.

You are right, I miscopied from their website. 3 million trades, billions of shares daily. Whether market making is beating the market is mostly semantics, I was just responding to the guy who said they flipped heads 10 times and got lucky.