Certainly some people got out of the dot-com era and did very well even if you exclude the Mark Cubans and Elon Musks of the world. I'm sometimes annoyed at myself that I didn't get into some stocks I actually knew a lot about early on although I didn't have a lot of money to invest at the time.

I was more talking about day traders specifically. I suspect most of them burned up their capital at some point or other. And a lot of this is probably related to the maxim that when taxi drivers start offering you investment advice, it's likely time to get out.