yes, yes... highly educated HFT pros like yourself keep busy with 5,000+ posts in a public message board, most of which are plagiarized photos of sports figures and 3rd-rate fast food. ** Now that we've dismissed the forum idiot posing as a real trader, why not ask this same question of Lescor and Dustin and other proven traders? Clearly the markets have changed of late. Price action is either hours of nothing or minutes of everything that takes place in a session. Rare are the sessions where you can trade all day long with decided edges. Now it's more about stepping in front of algos as price comes out of measured contractions. Is it worth it? Relative answer. If you can match your capable wages in profession outside the home while staying in, if that means working fewer hours, sure. If you cannot match your own profession income with trading at home, then clearly it ain't worth it. Day-trading is not some glamor or ego or status career... it is nothing more than a means to make money so you can spend the rest of your day and night doing what you really want instead. To a small percentage of men, trading is status or ego or self-esteem or contest... a way to measure up and mask insecurities. To the rest of us, it's just a rather mundane job. How it pays for each of us is the answer to that individual question of worthwhile or not.
6 months is tough to do. Id say more like 2 years or so? It really depends on whether a person has access to someone with experience or not. Having a mentor can really speed up the learning curve.
So you are stuck. Most people get stuck as you explain what happened to give you your viewpoint. Traders work in a dynamic (not static) circumstance. When you become a trader, you will notice this. Simply look at your trading platform option for the percent of capital you put into obtaining your "buying power". do you know about the formula for how your intial capital "grows"? I guess not. Initial capital is multiplied by an amount. That amount changes you will be finding out. Trading becomes more and more worth it from the beginning when it is worth it right from the beginning.
By the time you can do it you won't want to do it anymore. Secondly by the time you have learned how to do it you will have already burned through your account. As for long term sustainability you are actually risking a lot to make a little. If you are doing leveraged business you are operating in a window.
Run a small business, Never been a writer. Things were great for years but took a hit in 07-08 and haven't come back. One of my biz partners wanted to shut down altogether in 2010, but I managed to convince them to stay open in a more limited capacity. Still making profits but a long way from the glory days of what it used to be. For a while I had hopes that daytrading could be my next career, but decided I didn't like staring at screens all day and like the last guy said, was concerned about the sustainability of leveraged trading. I am still interested in longer term trading-- but not as a means of making a living.
Depends on your goals and performance. It may obviously vary from great satisfaction to worthless spend of time. Sometimes I feel working as a psychologist for $60/hr is not worth it (very draining). Sometimes I feel trading is not worth it (for the same reason plus periods of no profit), but overall it all does as long as you like the long-term result.