I often read on numerous trading forums that their strategy has a high win rate because they take very few trades and that they are ultra picky. But when a retail trader try to apply that same strategy in live market environment and forward test it, they fail to achieve similar results and in fact they hardly make any money. Why is that ?

In my opinion, trading say 4-5 setups per month is going to lead to increased pressure on each trade and thus increases the chances of making an illogical decision and of course limits potential gains. Most retail picky traders also have low average %R so when they do take losses:

a) They take longer to recover from both in terms of number of trades and time period (as they only take a few trades per month) and

b) The pressure on the next trade becomes even greater.

Whereas if you can trade say 20 trades per month then your equity curve should naturally look good because recovering from losses doesn't take long in terms of time or number of trades.

I firmly believe, that if you want to make it in this business, then you have to come out of this mentality of being ultra picky and fear of losses, otherwise you just end up going round in circles not getting anywhere.
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