W2 wages is EARNED INCOME. Earned income is REQUIRED by the IRS for things like funding retirement to name but one. Additionally W2 allows for a much easier life regarding personal interests and other types of investments. Further, the structure (S-corp) provides means for employee benefits like health insurance among others and allows for expenses and deductions (at the entity level) not available to individual taxpayers. And not to be overlooked, is the feature of potentially tax-free distributions. 2017 was ok, but not a great year trading-income-wise, which makes some of the entity benefits less "convincing". I understand your question.
+ about 50%. It was a terrible year. Did 750% last year. I traded all U.S. stocks, nothing sub $10. This year will be much better. Good luck to all. Wilt
50% gain across your whole trading portfolio and 750% the year prior? Approx size of portfolio? I did 25% gain on portfolio of my main busiest trading acc.
I love these discussions, but I believe they need some context, in particular: *return with either volatility or maximum draw-down of the year *some measure of the amount invested - for instance, months of income from your day job, or percentage of one's net assets On my side I've realized around 35% return with vol at 30%, on a portfolio of around 10% of my net assets (including housing/pension/car/wife/etc) - easily my best year ever, but I guess I could just have been long bitcoin or S&P with leverage...
My as-traded gains barely beat the SPX which, as a premium seller (99.5%), is pretty miserable. But I would be happy with that, if I had lesser drawdowns -- minPortVar, if you will. (Yes, there are all sorts of issues with a minPortVar goal, but it's still part of what got drilled into my brain ancient years ago: maxPortValue subject to minPortVar. Harry Markowitz.) This last hit (being the pop that started on Thanksgiving) was, I thought, going to take a while to work through. But this morning (gaining the fruits of changes in tactics away from pure credit spreads), we're up 0.50% SPX, and net liq. climbs climbs climbs, to recover nicely from T'Ging. As a (one-time) runner, you want to have 3 goals -- a Minimum Acceptable, an As Expected, and a Blue Sky. 5 years ago, 1%/week was doable with one eye closed. Now??? (See picture below...) With the nice harvesting over the past two weeks (read: "recovery"), I'm breathing a big sigh of relief. With the fact of the drawdown (without having had one for 9?? months or so), I'm bummed. Given the environment (which may be structural, and therefore permanent), I should be doing backflips. I don't often take a look at things like week-long candles, but on a recent Saturday morning, I was putzing through the Interwebs (hence, "StockCharts.com"), and pulled up this shot, and thought "Of course!" . As a proxy for IV, that ATR really tells the tale of what it's been like. Are things where I want? "No." But considering? *Really*?!?!? "Wow."