Yes and no - mostly the market is a game, like foxes and rabbits where the "rabbits" are forced into behaviours that the foxes can exploit. The dominant strategy for the rabbits is created by policy and regulation and also business success - all that money has to go somewhere. The foxes know that Mr. Rabbit will come back from the veg garden at 6pm and so wait at the hole. All is well as the rabbits grow in number, fatten and prosper, and so do the foxes. So in this situation its all games and you can get rich if you play well.

Good examples are carry trades and insurance market punts - people know that the central bank of Japan has to do X, they know that people are getting old in the developed world... betting on this happening is mostly a clever thing to do.

Every so often at random along comes an event that throws all this into the air - this might be something massive or something small but when it happens people go bust. For example, well look around.

There is a lot of talk that "oh we will know when we are in trouble and we will just change strategy" but sometimes that just proves not to be so. The point is that getting to play the game well for long enough to prosper is just luck, getting out at the right time is just luck. You can be stupid and get taken to the cleaners at any time, and you can play well and just be "the fat rabbit" at any time as well. So, be lucky and play well.

The ludic fallacy could apply here as well. If you calculate that on average you will make a profit but in actuality this profit fluctuates so wildly that you will almost certainly go bankrupt in the process the ludic fallacy could apply.

Another criticism by Nassim Taleb to this field is the use of the normal distribution to distributions that are not normal at all. This could lead to the problem that I described in the previous paragraph.

Also the fact that many market players got bailed out by governments when things went south. They may have been aware that this would happen all along, which would mean the explicit market game and the real market game are 2 very different things with very different rules.

If the person went bust, it is. If he didn't, it's not.