Nate Silver has a similar point[1], and claims that he has been successful by choosing fields that were not already saturated with excellent players. Baseball prediction was waiting to be cracked wide open with modern statistical techniques. It would now be much, much harder to make meaningful gains, you'd be competing with a host of competent firms who have years of experience and have long since claimed all the low-hanging fruit. The competition in online and even professional poker matches used to be much looser, until enough people started getting serious about it that the field narrowed to exclude merely above-average players.
To the OPs point, If you want to compete in a well-established academic field, you have to be really freaking good. Want to be an experimental physicist? You see the competition out there: they write books and appear on TV shows, or at least have tenure and get grant money. Are you really one of those guys or gals? On the other hand, there's interesting stuff out there that is just waiting for someone with a modicum of intellect and desire to revolutionize it. The challenge lies in finding (or creating) such a field and exploiting it at the right time. I think this can be done in academia or in business alike, business is just much more flexible and forgiving of mistakes.
As a currency people trade, you can always make money. Short it when you think it'll go down, buy when you think it'll go up. If you're right, you win.
To the OPs point, If you want to compete in a well-established academic field, you have to be really freaking good. Want to be an experimental physicist? You see the competition out there: they write books and appear on TV shows, or at least have tenure and get grant money. Are you really one of those guys or gals? On the other hand, there's interesting stuff out there that is just waiting for someone with a modicum of intellect and desire to revolutionize it. The challenge lies in finding (or creating) such a field and exploiting it at the right time. I think this can be done in academia or in business alike, business is just much more flexible and forgiving of mistakes.
[1] "The Signal and the Noise"