The first thing I would do is save each month these $500. At the same time develop your skills in paper trading. If you are consistently profitable in paper trading, start real trading with the money you saved. With $2-3000 you can already take a start. All depends of how good you are as trader. When I started I blew up my 50K account in notime. So even lots of money can not save you. If you are really good you can even trade with less then $1000. All depends of how good you are. Try to find that out first. Don't listen to other people telling you what you can or cannot. Watch objectively and realistically how good you are in paper trading. And take then the appropriate decision. Nobody else can judge what is realistic for you as nobody knows how good (or bad) you are. Start small, if it works you will be rich a little bit later, but it if goes wrong at least you will not lose everything you have.
Someone with so much technical skills and talents often tends to get down into the weeds, i.e., only seeing the tree rather than the forest. I wish I have 1/10 your skill set and talents, but I don't so instead have to rely on understanding the basic principles of economics and options. Principles are not complicated but the applications and models can mislead you if you don't understand the principles. Think Newton's law that leads to writing the algorithm for autopilot. But you cannot write a good navigation program without really understand Newton's Laws. A humble opinion from a mom and pop retail options trader: Focus on the why instead of how. Regards,
Develop a strategy and shop it around to the few prop firms that are looking for a profitable strategy. Positive Equity, Propex and some others back traders. Your background may be appreciated at firms that don't have full time quant devs. Or set up a newsletter and make calls. Use 500/mo for ads and ET sponsorship.
$50/mo gets you TT or CQG and you can pull all the data you want from the API. Seriously though, @truetype's suggestion is solid. A six figure job and some contracting on the side...you can get a decent chunk of change in a few years. Enough to start trading futures spreads for sure. You could prop trade full time and contract on the side or configure a mix of work/trading options that suit your lifestyle.
A few freegans on here can teach you how to scrape data on the house and you can eat on the cheap grubbing Hamburgers and pizza, find a couple of friends who have a couch to surf and in a couple of years you're golden.. Dont worry about the calls you make, it's all about branding..Good Luck.
Speaking of branding, I'll probably open source my options backtester platform and accelerate it's integration with the live trading system by paying guys on UpWork to do some work. I'm not terribly happy releasing all of this for free (actually paying for it) but looks like it's the only way to personal branding. Without which those 6 figure salaries / contracts are just as elusive as $100k of capital when you only got $10k.
No, but trading with less than six-figures while one could be making over six-figures per year doesn't make sense (consider the opportunity cost associated with trading). Trading takes a lot of time and focus. Better to focus on a job while starting out. Then when one has enough capital, consider trading. And yes, it's easier to make money with a large account than a smaller account because more trading strategies can be employed.