Thank you for these interesting posts.

There is a literature on the development of abilities (like telling instruments from each other). Most of it is focused on the development of expertise. Separate streams examine the development of expertise in sport, other fields (e.g. playing music) and trading in the financial markets. It is from this field that the famous "10,000 hours of deliberate practice" rule of thumb comes from.

I think that investors who think they apply intuition successfully are kidding themselves. Most investors do not get deliberate practice (that is, effortful practice with clear, quick feedback) because most investors do not track the results of their decisions clearly and because, even for those that do -- say with proper attribution of every single decision -- feedback tends to come a long time after the event.

Even for the small number of investors who do get deliberate practice, many make decisions so rarely that to notch up 10,000 hours would take an implausible amount of time. This is especially an objection to tactical asset allocation, where a practitioner may make, at most, one decision a month. Even if we allow that every decision counts as a full 12-hour day of deliberate practice, that is still only 144 hours a year, meaning it would take about 70 years to notch up the necessary experience (and, no doubt the market regime would change in that time in any case).

Your account also requires that there should be something there that can be known intuitively. There really is a difference between a clarinet and a bassoon, and that difference can be detected by a computer. There really is a small-cap effect, and that effect can be discovered by time-series analysis. To use an analogy, if you have a farm, there is no point in going out into the fields with a really sharp scythe if no wheat has actually grown. For your view of the usefulness of intuition to be useful (over and above analysis) you must hold both that there is something there to be "intuited" and that that thing cannot be found by analysis. There are such things -- in particular, the subtleties of human social interactions, which we are all more-or-less naturally adept at understanding -- but I do not think it is plausible that the relevant kinds of things exist in the financial markets. Human beings are naturally very bad at understanding financial markets!

So I think that investors who think that they have intuition are either not tracking their performance properly (over a long time period and compared to a relevant benchmark), or have earned a risk premium or exploited a market anomaly that they did not understand, by random chance. Some monkeys are bound to win in any coin-flipping contest.

Finally, on your proposed model of intuition: this is really a definition, not a model, and it is so wide as to encompass anything. An interpretation could clearly be a system 1 or a system 2 activity; the kind of things you talk about (e.g. telling one wine from another) is clearly a system 1 activity. You do not give a reason for rejecting a two-system model of the mind, and the alternative you propose can co-exist with it perfectly well.