Ok. I will give you the benefit of doubt and assume you are just trying to conduct some marketing research for school homework. Trader Lesson 101: What is in it for me? Thus, how much are you willing to pay for that info and my time to answer that?
Suppose the question is legit. If twenty people replied with 20 different answers, it might not help anyways. I suppose he is just trying to see where he might fit in the grand scheme of things. Face it, go to the book store and every book is how to make a million trading, it is not a very realistic. He might be asking real people for honest answers, this still won't help. That being said, this is like anything else, you get out of it, what you put into it, wait let me rephrase that, you get out of it a lot less than you put into it for quite some time.
Most of your questions are answered via this forum thread as already suggested by Steve... http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=83837 Mark