Or more likely $50,000 to $5. The first group of traders outnumber drownpruf's acquaintance by 100:000 to 1.
Two ppl have PMed me so I'll elaborate as the search isn't working properly. The guy is a German national who started trading DNT exotics with BOM in or around 2003, so it's well under 11 years as this story is a few years old. He began betting share and index DNTs at Betonmarkets. Within two years he'd made a couple million in personal and shell accounts. He opened accounts with SocGen's clickoptions and took them for a couple mil. He then moved on to FX exotics with UBS and DB. The equity stuff is capacity constrained while he could easily move 1-5MM per ticket at UBS. He would literally go all-in many times on two to six week durations with the occasional seven-day trade. IIRC he went something like 90-100 bets without a loss. I haven't talked to him in over a year, but he told me that he had a string of losers in which he lost 20-30MM. He told me the amount but I don't recall the exact figure. He once parlayed a ~$100k bet (Philips AG? and others) in a run to a couple of million in the span of three months. This timing was critical as it was the jump to forming a trading corp (GmbH) and moving in FX. I introduced the guy to 1st and 2nd gen exotics. I don't really know him that well other than he was born and raised in Dusseldorf and now lives in Zug. The guy is the Keyser Soze of trading. If I posted his name you would get d*ck from any search engine, other than a few philanthropic hits.
You could have done it in 2 months if you bought far OTM AAPL March 2012 550 calls in mid Jan 2012. People would probably be better off doing the hail mary than a slow bleed by a thousand paper cuts that most traders go through. Paraphrasing Jack Schwager, if you're in a game with negative expectation (most traders), you're better off betting infrequently and big.
you just need believe in one trade. most people are doing the contrary. when crash, they wait, in a bull market, buy dip is the very efficient. when up, they are stuck, why, they wait again for the dip, but it marches higher. then everything looks great, it seems SKY NO FALLING, they jump in, then the correction comes, they think they are in the down bear market, they can not resist selling. I know, why buy low and sell high is so difficult, since you make so. NEXT TIME WHEN THE MARKET DROPS, it might continue to drop. in another word, it may reverses and becomes a bear market. PEOPLE GENERALIZTION, that is why they never get it. they trade based on the past, not based on what will happen. That is why people often find themselves in the wrong side. from $50k to $1m, with the right wind, and tools, it is matter of several trades, even just one trade!
Buy SPY/QQQ/etc OTM call options with near term expiry at the end of a correction and hope for a 5% increase before expiry which would give a 200-1000% return. Buy SPY/QQQ/etc OTM call options after a correction that expire in 6mo-2 years and hope for a bull market and a year like 2013. Buy calls/puts of a company before quarterly earnings get released and get lucky on the direction. Short with puts during a bear market. Long with calls during a bull market. That's all I can think of for now. It's more about luck than anything.