I often hear people say—"Institutions crush retail traders, retail always lose." "After AI arrived, human traders have no food to eat, and retail traders are even worse off."

It sounds very reasonable, especially like exposing the false "truth." But if you think about it carefully, where is the problem with these statements? They treat the market as a camp war, dividing participants into three hostile countries. Retail vs. institutions vs. AI, who wins and who loses, as if the fate has already been decided.

Actually, it's not like that. The real logic of the market is more like a rainforest ecosystem, not an arena.

Your profit and loss don't depend on whether you're retail or institutional at all. What determines it? It's a bunch of more realistic, more fundamental parameters.

Take the time scale, for example—some trade on a second-by-second basis, others watch the monthly chart. Entry motivations are also diverse—speculation, arbitrage, risk hedging, rebalancing, market making, risk control balancing. Different capital sizes mean completely different possibilities. Costs like transaction fees, slippage, funding rates—each participant faces different cost structures. There are also various constraints—drawdown limits, compliance restrictions, redemption pressures, KPI requirements. Order splitting ability, execution discipline, portfolio management... these hard skills are the real points of differentiation.

Don't be fooled by the term "institution"; it includes market makers, macro traders, trend followers, statistical arbitrage, options volatility trading... the differences are so vast they are almost not the same thing.

Similarly, the retail group is also very diverse. Some gamble short-term, some are rooted in long-term allocation, some follow trends with discipline, some patiently capture structural opportunities.

So that phrase "institutions must win, retail must lose" is actually nonsense. The real differentiation occurs on another dimension.