I traded one time in my life...The rest is investing (many with covered calls). In the year 2000, I KNEW the dot com bubble was going to happen. You had 100 companies not making profits...It was smoke and mirrors. They would all say "this is the greatest concept since sliced bread"...Think Pets.com. I drove to the Morgan Stanley office and signed up for level 2 trading. This included all the warnings and paperwork. Sometime in 2000, I bought a put on QQQ...About 5 months out. I slowly watched as the Nasdaq continued to rise!! I just let my option expired worthless (about $500)....Then the market crashed. My timing was off by a few months. That left such a bad taste in my mouth, I have stuck with investing rather than trading. Just me...
This thread is better than the fucked up (start ups gone wrong) niche. I obviously belong to this group as well. A software dev that thought that could automate anything. Broker stopped responding to my trades and my marvellous algo of course kept trying, "if they are not responding I will keep calling" behaviour. Needless to say that I blew my account the next day, it could have gone my way and I would be rich now, but it didn't, I kept buying the wrong side and three years later I am still trying to fill that hole.