This is really not the best place to get the answer you are looking for. Whatever trading strategy you use one still has to manage risk, the better one gets at managing risk the higher the return. Most professional option sellers should be able to make a 10% on 800k keeping risk low at all times. With strategic option selling you shot for singles and you are market neutral or semi directional. Trend following is different because it shoots for home runs, you are willing to take several small losses to make a big gain. It's much easier to apply if you have the discipline to follow even a basic mechanic trend following system. You can also combine the two styles for instance you could sell naked options as long as you are not against the trend. ( that you identify with a system) You don't have to stare at the screen all day long with the styles I described, but it is a full time job. It took me 5 years to trade infrequently and make enough money to do whatever I like. If you send me a private message I'll reply with my website, I am not selling anything, I am just talking about trading and things I learned. It's a good starting point. Just like you I started with 0 knowledge in finance in 2005 I am still trading and I plan to trade for many years to come.
1st thing 1st.....drop the urgency to rush into trading. While I believe there is no such thing as training in trading, taking something like a bootcamp with Don sounds like a good idea. you can learn the basics, who's out there, etc etc. most traders lose their starting money, so try to absorb as much as you can while you trade small
Personally i think that managing all that money with no experience is a suicide. You are better off investing 700k on something stable at 10% per year and learn the from the beginning. You may as you may not become profitable over time. Forex is one nasty market where leverage is EXTREMELY dangerous, it is hard to day trade but not impossible. Cheers
There is no such thing as something stable which returns 10% per year. You can't make a passive 10% a year consistently without taking a good chunk of risk.
My advice is do it very carefully and protect the downside (if you can't do that, you can't be a trader). The major problem is you are a total novice, and most novices blow out their entire savings at least once before either quitting (95%+), or leaning to trade (small %). That's not such a big problem for most beginners as their savings are 4 or small 5 figure accounts, but for someone with almost 1 mill to play with, representing most of their wealth, it would be disastrous. Another problem is you have been a successful entrepreneur. Many of the skills and talents needed to be an entrepreneur are quite different to that needed to be a good trader. Very few have both skill sets/temperaments. A retired poker pro posted earlier - that is actually a very similar skill set (pattern recognition & game-playing). Probably >50% of traders are fairly good at either poker, chess, or some other such games. Few good traders have founded and run a successful non-trading business for 10 years+. Here's a safe approach - set up a limited company, put 25k in, and then trade via that. This way if you blow up you have a cap on the maximum loss and your savings are safe. If you blow up and want to try again, give yourself a maximum of 3 "lives" i.e. once you lose 25k 3 times in a row, quit for good. You will either learn to trade by then or will give up. Keep your remaining £725k invested in a way that minimises the risk of permanent loss of capital, whilst protecting against inflation and providing a decent return. My suggestion for conservative investing is: i) pay off all debts including your remaining mortgage ii) place a good chunk of the money (e.g. 400k worth) into a pension for tax-free compounding. Use your full ISA allowance each year. Apart from a tax-shelter, this also protects half your savings from things like lawsuits, bankruptcy, or a nasty trader blowup if you turn into a trader/gambler (quite common) or underestimate the risk (very common, especially with people who have made some money via business. iii) Use low-cost index-tracker funds (do not pay more than 0.25% for most G7 index funds; for foreign/emerging markets you may have to pay more but always use the lowest cost fund of decent size - Vanguard are good) to construct the following investment portfolio: (summary) 30% bonds, 50% stocks, 15% real-estate investment trusts (REITs), 5% commodities (detail) 15% index-linked UK bond fund (or buy them direct) 15% 2-5 year duration normal UK bond fund (or buy them direct) 15% FTSE 100 index tracker 15% UK small-cap index tracker 10% MSCI/world index tracker 10% emerging markets index tracker 15% REIT fund (e.g. VNQ) 5% commodity fund (e.g. RJI) iii) Each year, some of your funds will have big gains, some small gains, some will have losses - this means your target % allocations will be out of whack (e.g. if you had this portfolio in 2009, by 2010 your stocks would be up huge so you'd be overweight stocks). At the end of each year you should thus sell some from the gainers, and invest more into the losers, so that your portfolio goes back to the standard % weighting (i.e. at the end of 2009 you'd sell the excess gain in stocks: if your 50% weighting had risen to 65%, you'd sell so it went back to 50% of your total portfolio again, and plough the sale proceeds into bonds/commodities) iv) Hold for the long-term - you *must* resist the temptation to sell out and go to cash in a serious bear market when everything looks horrible. If you make 7-7.5% per annum then you double your money every 10 years. So by the time you are 65 you should have increased your savings by around 8-fold if your portfolio has made 7-7.5% per annum. v) as you get older, increase your bond allocation. A good rule of thumb is have 40% in bonds when you are 40, 50% when you are 50, 60% at 60 etc. vi) put at least 10% of your net income into your portfolio each month. vii) if stocks or real estate get into a massive valuation bubble (e.g. like 1999-2000, or 2005-07 in real estate), consider reducing your weighting somewhat e.g. go from 70% down to 40% stocks, or go from 15% to 5% REITs, and increase your bond weighting. viii) (very important) read everything you can about index-tracking and passive portfolio investing. I recommend "The Intelligent Asset Allocator" by Bernstein; if you are not comfortable with some basic maths then he has a simplified version in "The 4 pillars of investing". David Swensen's "Unconventional Success" is also worth reading. ix) keep your cash savings in regulated banks with deposit insurance. Do not exceed the deposit insurance limit. Government bond funds are however similar to cash with even less bankruptcy risk, so there's no reason to have more than about 30-50k in bank accounts unless you are a huge spender (in which case you aren't going to save & invest diligently anyway). x) don't keep all your eggs in one basket. Never have more than about 1/3 of your net worth with any institution. Invest only in ETFs or funds, not exchange-traded notes or financial products (these have credit risk with the issuer - ask anyone who bought Lehman "enhanced index tracker" or "protected principal" stock market "replicators". They lost 100%). You can expect a normal bear market (20-35%) every 5-7 years or so, and more serious ones (40%+) every 20-25 years (we recently had 2 in one decade, which is unusual). If you think you'd be tempted to sell in those situations, you need to reduce your stock allocation from the beginning e.g. do 50% stocks 50% bonds. As an example, in the 2007-2009 bear market, a 50/50 stock/bond portfolio actually did not lose that much money. The stock portion lost about 55% (27.5% portfolio loss) but the bond portion did nicely and not only paid income each of the years but also had some moderate capital gains. So you would have lost 15-20% from the very top to the very bottom of the bear market, and this was the worst bear since the 1930s - not a bad performance. Compare this to the reckless investors who were 100% long stocks. Remember, the biggest risk in the long-term is failing to make adequate returns above inflation. Having even a 50% drawdown part way through your investment career is relatively unimportant compared to making 8% per annum over 30 years (10-fold gain) versus 6% per annum (5.75-fold gain). With 30% in bonds you should rarely if ever lose 50%, only a future Great Depression or Japan-style deflation would do that, and if you kept saving and rebalancing in that scenario then you will have years of investing into stocks at bargain prices where long-term returns would be around 15% going forward. If you cannot resist the urge to speculate, just set aside a limited portion of your account (e.g. 10-20%, the lower the better) as your speculative money, and accept you may lose it all. If you turn out to be a good trader, than the higher % annual returns will grow your 10-20% speculative tranche so that it eventually becomes 50%+ of your total capital. You don't need to make any additions to it from your savings. If you are a lousy trader, then losses will reduce the speculative tranche down to 5% or less of your net worth. Thus this way you let the actual trading returns dictate how much of your ££ you have in speculative endeavours - if you are good you commit more capital by retaining profits; if you suck then you naturally reduce your exposure, that's automatic money-management without requiring any discipline. There are three more major risks to your savings and financial security: lawsuits, divorce, and falling for investment "pitches". I'll cover these briefly: i) lawsuit risk. Do not under any circumstances ever work or do business in the USA, or sign any contracts under US law. If you invest in property or direct business there, use a limited liability company. The USA has capricious lawsuit risk and is notorious for excessive damages awards in civil cases. Many well-off people have gone bankrupt via lawsuits despite not committing any intentional criminal conduct, whereas this is very rare in any other country in the world. ii) you are already married, so it's hard to avoid divorce raping if your marriage goes south. You thus have a strong financial incentive to stay married, as the UK has the highest divorce awards in the world. If your marriage hits problems, go quickly to counselling. Don't knob your secretary etc. If you get divorced and remarry, always use a prenup. iii) Falling for investment pitches. Do not make direct investments in other people's businesses. Do not invest in mutual funds (apart from index trackers). Do not invest in hedge funds (high fees, low transparency, impossible to separate skill from luck unless you are also a skilled investor/trader). Do not use private banks or wealth management services. Do not buy funds offered by financial advisors (the only time to use a financial advisor is if you are too ill-disciplined to research index-tracking and to do the rebalancing yourself, or if your emotions make it hard to follow the plan during strong bull or bear markets. In this case it's worth paying a good advisor say 0.5-0.75% per annum to do it for you.) Do not use borrowing to invest in buy-to-let property in excess of your net worth (e.g. if you have 800k in savings + a 300k house, you should never own more than £1.1 mill of property). Be aware of "Madoff risk". If you are sensible, you will spend a minimum of 100 hours (ideally more) researching investment via reputable books and online sources (not Elitetrader lol), before investing a penny. Think of how long you take to research buying a car, multiply by about 100, and you have an idea of how much to spend reading about investing when you have a million at stake.
+3 for GoC's post (with one small correction: don't necessarily pay off your mtge, as it may help you offset certain risks in your investment portfolio).