I take my trading and actual business both equally as seriously, actually trading slightly more seriously, i really dont take either that seriously, lifes to short for that. Most people lose money trying to run a business so guess we can allow it.
If you're risking your house and car, and in such a way that you can lose them after only three months, well yes that's pretty stupid. I won't be doing that. I agree the OP sounds naive with the "generating steady income" line. I made a living playing online poker for couple of years. First year I made ~60K. Did I make a steady 5K per month? No, it was more like win 15K one month, lose 5K the next, etc. My friend's sister asked me once how I did one day. I told her I lost 3700, but yesterday I made 4300. You have to be able to handle that psychologically.
Most of you people are very confused and I am amazed as the amount of energy you guys have to write nonsense, but it does shed light as to your background and what you spend time thinking on. Long story short: Once you work with pros and see how the money is really made you don't try and trading as a gambling den activity anymore. I see the demographic on this site is mostly immature retail gamblers, no sense asking the blind for advice.
There's a couple things you need to know if you're serious about trading for a living: 1) You really do need to avoid withdrawing from your fund as much as possible. I realize this goes against the "for a living" part, but if you can have a secondary income stream it really will help in building your fund. Few things kill a fund faster than monthly withdraws. I'm sure you've heard of the power of compound interest? Well how about NEGATIVE compounding? 2) There's no such thing as "regular monthly gains" in trading. You can only control outcomes in the medium to long-term. So the whole X% a month, or X% a year nonsense is just that, nonsense. Successful trading systems go through periods of outperformance, and underperformance. And I hope I don't have to explain why you can't always predict when will be which one. 3) The options market is efficient, so unless you have some kind of quantifiable edge, you're just speculating on what you think you know. Real money losses will quickly remind you that it wasn't an actual edge at all, it was just bad investor psychology tricking you into thinking you had an edge. The only way to be successful is to have a system with a true quantifiable edge, and then you need the psychology to stick to the system over long periods of time over many occurrences.
We're All just Speculating -- regardless of what strategy and/or what instrument you trade...don't kid yourself on that... by using some smart-sounding term like "quantifiable edge". ...like it's some kind of guaranteed thing.
The word quantifiable is considered "smart-sounding" terms to you? I thought this was a traders forum. All it means is you need a mathematical edge, not an imagined one based on directional market predictions. You know like, QUANTIFIABLE.