Trading require that the individual take responsibility of his trading and not shift it to another. To succeed as a trader, you have to own the process because it is filled with psychological principles that cannot be transfer easily. This therefore means that trading due to the influence of another person is dangerous because it will lead to problems in which the individual would want to shift the blame.
Has people been trading due to individual influence? Usually everyone should trade on their own without having to entirely relying on someone to trade or even to copy from someone else to make good trading. Trading is good when you have the right knowledge to follow up with couples with the fundamentals of trading such as TA and FA also an intensive research on each strategies.
Some people dive into trading because they are being influenced by those who boasts their profit in trading. They talk about trading like it's like easy to earn money from it. They never tell how stressful trading can be and the risks if a person does it without enough knowledge.
I've been in that situation before. I first tried trading because of the influence from others. While I was really earning some profit at the beginning, I think that was only due to my luck. When market showed how volatile it can be, I stopped trading because I was just like gambling and losing money from it.