Gold trading is not profitable at all. For someone to profit from a trade, someone else must lose. Everything cancels out and the net result is exactly zero profits.
Now that’s not to say any individual can’t win. Just that some people will win and some people will lose.
Nor does that mean that investing in gold can’t be profitable. If the price of gold rises, the total value of all the gold increases and everyone who has invested in gold profits. Of course, if the world decides to stop holding wealth in a worthless hunk of metal and instead hold wealth in a worthless digital currency then the price of gold is liable to fall instead.
Also probably worth knowing... The guys that win tend to be professional traders with lots of resources and access to non-public information. The guys that lose include amateur traders looking for get-rich-quick ideas on the internet.
When you are trading equity or bond, you are putting money in entities which generate profit (or tax from growing economy in case of government bonds). So while many people say trading is zero sum game, totality of trading bond or equity is not really zero sum for a growing economy.
Gold on the other hand don’t grow in size. It generate no wealth on its own. It is just yellow metal, which cost money to store. Trading in gold is truly zero sum game (and veryslightly negative if you count the cost of storing gold).
Only utility of gold is that it is a great hedge because it’s value is physical. I can’t vanish like bond or equity when economy goes tits up and companies goes bankrupt. So buy gold just in case of really bad time. But I wouldn’t trade/speculate in gold (unless you buy it when it is super cheap in good time and prepare to hold it for more than 10 years).