If you were able to survive, and even thrive, trading penny stocks then I would think you could find a way to trade larger cap stocks or more liquid equities. I don't know what approaches you used in the past or your methodology for picking stocks, entry points and exits. I trade a lot of tech stocks that tend to have a higher beta so I can see more intra-day movement.
Understood, and nothing wrong with what you did. I'm just saying $90K disposable account is pretty rare for a large majority of Americans, so it hardly qualifies as modest. But the OP himself seems confused on the issue, so apparently no big deal.
Nice history that goes back to the old days. A few related points from my recollection. You mention many of the stocks you traded .. to add a few more you had DELL and most any large cap tech stock in late 90's. A guy in our office I traded in could make $40K a day trading 5K blocks of DELL (or INTC, SUNW, MSFT, etc.). He also could lose $20K in a day. But he kept his emotions in check. Losing was, and always will be, part of the game. Re: $800K commissions. I was paying $25 each way at All Tech plus ECN fees. Commissions today are dirt cheap compared to that. That said, back then trading for teenies or 1/8 or 1/4 could be quite profitable versus the penny spreads we have now. Like you my volume is less today than back then. And one has to adapt to the changing conditions. I often scale into more trades today than back then. Back then we could SOES a MM for 1000 shares and then maybe hit another. Once they moved off the ask a stock could move 1/8 or 1/4 and you could pocket easy $$$ pretty fast.
I already posted I was a former engineer with math background. No trust fund etc. I was single at the time and lived below my means so as to save up the $$$ I felt I needed to succeed. I met the woman I married13 years ago. She was well aware trading income was my sole source. Last, ocean front and island living do not mean high overhead. I don't need a 5000 sq. ft. house. And greed has never been a part of who I am. Living in an ideal environment and having access to the outdoors (run, bike, kayak) is there for whether you own a mansion, condo or relatively simple smaller house.
I recall when I traded in an office we'd pounce on new stories when CNBC was blaring away. Get a bunch of guys to buy (or short) whatever was being talked about. And with fractions things could move really fast. Then exit ... and wait for the next one.
I did ok and spent it all on a 7500 sq foot home in Villanova PA, cars and wasted the rest. The Realtor I am talking about it did it with e*trade in .com stocks--- not real estate. He just started trading too.
Given that only about 20 percent of American households break the six-figure mark, yeah it's a fair point 90 or 100k is not a modest amount for many. It's a subjective term, but for the sake of discussion I'm not sure it matters whether someone's initial stake was 5k or 150k. Interesting nonetheless.
"Modest" is a relative term, but the simple fact remains, the more capital you start with, the longer you can survive, which has to equate to a higher success rate. Starting with $10k and making a good living is probably squarely in lottery territory. Starting with $100k gives you better odds. $1mm even better, and so on.
It's the old joke: Q - how do you make a small fortune in the stock market? A - start with a large one. Of course the more money you have to start with, the bigger the drawdown you can withstand and the better odds of recovery and long-term success. But that wasn't the spirit of the first post. Of course the OP has capitulated on that point so whatever.
At the risk of going off-topic (this thread went South since around page 8 anyway), but just in case you're still following here, be careful about using a TFSA for trading, especially day trading! Even though the law doesn't explicitly forbid anything in a TFSA, recently Harper's been auditing an increasing number of TFSA's with "suspicious activity" which seems to equate simply "any account yielding more than 1%/year". Several publicized cases of people having to pay back taxes on TFSA gains already exist (some traders, some are just (un)lucky investors). Apparently they're pushing that the intent of the TFSA is to give a break to regular savings accounts with literally no interests to save taxes on anyway. Likely in the coming years they'll clarify the law to explicitly forbid trading in those things, and in the mean time they're already collecting taxes regardless of the "tax-free" designation so there's little incentive to jump into it now. I'm still considering it, but it sounds like a soon to be closed loophole at best, and already too late at worst. The only people who seem to stand a chance in these tax audits right now are those with full-time jobs unrelated to finance and the markets, who simply got lucky with the right long-term long positions (held longer than 30 days). The ironyinjustice is that nobody with a loss in a TFSA can use it as such for tax purposes: it's one-way, making it worse than a regular account where trading's treaded like a normal self-employed business. As for the nail biting: why not continue with the easy penny money in parallel with your new ventures until they're profitable to your liking? Too time-consuming I'm guessing?