Trading is all relative. You can continue to improve yourself and say you are getting closer and closer to where you want to be as a trader, but what about your competition. What are they doing? Are they getting better, faster, more capitalized? This falls back onto the basic tenets of Game Theory. Where we continue to make choices based on previous actions and our opponent’s previous actions but what is our opponent doing? The same thing! Hence the "prisoners dilemma". If you put 10 guys in a room with a million dollars to be had through trading and let them all trade till it's all in the hands of one guy. At some point, it does not matter how much self improvement you make. In fact, all traders could theoretically make improvements to themselves, but does this really matter. In the end, one guy ends up with all the money. As traders, we don't get paid for making self improvements. We get paid for transferring money from other traders to ourselves. So therefore in this equation, we cannot ignore what progress the other trader is making.