Last three months are fabulous, we have every now and then periods like this that profits can be huge, but volatility too. But I think it is no problem for you to handle that in a safe way. Just pay attention if for you 2016/17 was not so good in the ES. Last three months were exceptional, not normal. So if you need this type of market (last three months) you might be disappointed because this cannot continue. Would not advice newbies to start at this moment in the ES.
Not really. In Engineering, you can learn 80-95% of what you need in the first 1-3 years. If longer then 5 years, then you're a slow learner. Trading is the opposite. It's simple but 95% of what you learned out there was bad information. How long it takes you to figure that out depends on yourself. Then takes more time to unlearn all the bad habits you thought was good. However, if given the right info and training from the start I suspect anyone can be making 100% annual profits in 1-2 years. Trading is simple. Just counter-intuitive. I have already shut down the R&D process. There is not much more to learn about trading that you can't learn in the first 1-2 years.
Start wide. You won't always know which trade is going to be the real winner this week or this month so you don't want to miss it through some unconscious bias for a given trade. But when it shows as a winner, go deep: you have to win big when you win.
There's a big difference between: Jack of all/several vs. Jack only knows one thing at a low level, or thinking that Jack of All means Jack only knows at a low level. "Spreading your focus on everything" vs. shifting your focus to acquire a knowledge or skill that will add to your repertoire. Fewer and fewer occupations allow one to be effective in a role or in accomplishing goals if you've only focused on one thing. Those hiring know this, and the trend over the past ten years (more?) is a strong & increasing demand - with big bucks - for competent generalists with the mix of specific skills for an environment. And they'd better be prepared to become competent in others as the need to have those in the mix arises; you need a track record of being able of doing so. That said, some people can only work with blinders on; others are moving up/down layers of abstraction, sifting left & right, and inside/outside the box, bringing bits & pieces or whole solutions or methodologies in from all over; and there's a whole bunch of people scaled in between.
That's not necessarily true. Jim Simons run Rentech, arguably the best quant hedge fund in history with average returns of 38% over decades with very little drawdowns. He hires the best mathematicians, physicists, computational linguistics, computer scientists, etc. Almost never hire MBA types. Supposedly, he uses non-trivial models.
I broadly agree with you up to a certain limit. If you are specialist you will get paid big bucks up to a limit. A specialist who master a highly technical topic can get paid a lot more than a generalist at the lower levels. But you must realize the highest paid people in Corporate America are NOT specialists, but generalist(CEOs and senior management). Even the very best engineers at Google gets paid less than VPs at Google for example. It's not that a CEOs know 10x more than the most technical engineers but a CEO easily make 100x+ times more. Just sayin'
This makes complete sense to me. (In principle, we look at people with math/physics degrees, sometimes people with other really academically rigorous subjects - whether sciences/arts - but almost never at anyone with business/MBA/finance qualifications. I know we're far from alone.)
Trading is full of contradictions, you should go with what suits your personality whether wide or deep IE there is no correct answer eg famed trader Richard Dennis had KISS as one of his 4 guiding principles and Soros made trading decisions based on how his back felt.