Is Day Trading Bad?

Motley Fool Staff published an article yesterday about why Day Trading is bad. http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/fool/20041227/bs_fool_fool/1104160020
I feel it's important to give both sides of the story. After reading the article I came to the conclusion that it was not much more than a promotional piece for their type of service and method of interaction with the market. Motely Fool advocates long term investment strategies. That is for sure the more popular approach to investing and for good reasons.

1) Up until recently individuals had very little access to sophisticated data analysis
2) Only in the last 5 years has technology made it possible for the average investor to really see market data in an cost effective way (i.e., without paying in the 000s/month for the access)

One major flaw with the Motley Fool article is the assumption that research from them or anyone else makes you a more informed investor. That seems very foolhearty. Why would a rational individual investor believe that they can do better research then analysts at Goldman and various hedge funds that specialize in the subjects?

The truth of the matter is that good investing and trading require some good luck, but aside from just dumb luck you have to have a differentiator that gives you an edge. In the markets just like in life, patterns repeat themselves. You drive home from work at 5:00 pm you are expecting to hit traffic. Why? Because you have seen this happen over and over again. The market behaves in much the same way with different types of patterns. A personal anecdote: I bought SIRI in my IRA at 3.50 noticing the momentum come into the stock. It ran up to 7.50 in one week and I sold. It continued higher but I made over 100% in just about a 2 week time frame. Of course this is very rare, but time and returns are not necessarily correlated. As Neo did in the movie, "The Matrix", if you can open your eyes and see what is happening, you can take advantage of the situation. How? Whether performing martial arts after downloading the skill or spotting ripe, predictive patterns - both activities require the right tool and technology for the task.