Not hard to enter the trading world. You think you have what it takes (oh boy). Put down $50,000 and start trading.
I'm a business student, and I have to agree that there are many franchises that are questionable in terms of ROI. For example, we have a major gasoline retailer up here in Canada (which shall remain unnamed), which involves very high upfront costs in order to purchase and establish your own franchise. The individual owners make very little money off gasoline sales, and all merchandise sales prices are set by head office, so the franchisee basically has no price control. I attended their supplier tradeshow a few years back (was working a summer job for one of their suppliers), and many of the franchisees were extremely disgruntled with the state of things. Running one of these gas stations essentially meant attempting to generate ROI one bag of chips at a time, I would really love to see the books for one of the franchisees. As an amusing side note, one of the last, best means for making money was to install a car wash on a franchisee's site, though that involved big bucks as well (those auto carwashes are damn expensive). I suspect that one of the primary reasons that people choose to go the franchise route is the degree of hand holding, as well as group marketing benefits. When you purchase a franchise you end up with someone helping you through the entire process re: finding a location, building the site, acquiring equipment, how to run your business, etc. Getting back to treating trading as a business, I agree completely. I'm currently an undercapitalized university student, my primary goal over the past year has been to gain some practical experience trading the markets. My next goal is to start building up a trading account, fortunately my current job will likely fit in very nicely with trading (I could work full-time yet still be able to trade for a significant portion of the trading day). Regarding treating trading like a business, a perfect example is that I've been doing a fair bit of research and trialing to find a good quote feed solution. More importantly, I was looking for an economical choice. When I was first looking around at options such as Esignal, I found the monthly cost to be very high (roughly $250 USD/month), so I was very happy when I found an alternate solution that will run me roughly $70-80 USD/month. Pretty standard business thinking - the lower your costs are, the more likely you are to be profitable.
Hey millydog, first of all, my respect on that everest climb. That's gotta be one of the best experiences in the whole world. Regarding your question, the one that initiated the threat. I think you should look for a prop firm where you can adquire real life market experience while risking the firm's capital [not your own], so that you have a huge leverage and you're able to trade taking advange of scaled economies present at the stock market. I would recomend swift trade, as they give you the chance to get real market experience at the CME, NYSE, NASDAQ, AMEX and LSE [london], you probably wont make a million dollars with them but you'll get the chance to try first hand several different markets and decide which one is the one for you. As well as getting started on building a curriculum in the industry. Another upside is that they dont require any of the NASD exams [series 7,53,65, etc] so you can get your experiene at the market before investing your time and money at getting certified. It also has the advantage of having offices all over the planet, so you an travel for a while... You can get a good taste of the market and get a better idea of which market works best for you. my 0.02