Neke, maybe you are right, maybe you are wrong... sure thing is that I will say with my GRANDIOSE illusions and work my ass off until I make GOOD money day in day out, until then I will just keep doing the work. I like trading, I like it a lot, but not enough to plan to earn less money per hour that with my standard job...
hehe, i'm kind of the opposite. If I could make half as much money trading as I do in my job, I'd just trade for a living and never 'work' again, even if it meant always earning a smaller wage. Unfortunately, I think consistently profitable trading could well just be a big lie being sold to us, though! (i.e impossible)
BA, the point is that either you are consistent and in such case you will make as much money as you need, or you are not consistent, in which case you just won't be making money. I plan to be in the first category...
AJ, I am not so sure this is the case, most may think that that is their aim but as soon as you start thinking that consistency is unachievable you will stop looking for it and compromise for making some money now and then. I am confident that consistency is very achievable it may just take a bit extra time and work. I see it my trading since I completely revised the way I was trading in the last month things are getting better every day, I have finally accepted some hard truth about trading and separated myself from traders worst enemies: Fear&Greed. Now I trade serenely and I have no fear of losing and no greed of making more money than what is available. I lose consistency when I revert to the old me and get back into old bad habits. My main focus now is to reinforce the good new way of trading and to increase my experience in reading what happen in real time.
Of course you can make good money trading, and not need regular job. It is the expectation you set I called grandiose: make money each and every day; no draw-down; 10% each month of each year
Not all of that is grandiose. There's really no need to try to make money every day if you're aiming for 10%. You can even make that 10% on one day if you're patient enough. Your reward risk ratio will need to be better then 2. Your success rate will need to be better then 50%.
The application of intellectual capital and technology (scale, law of large numbers) to capacity constrained niches can create some amazing results far beyond what you suggest. It does not take 20 years to get rich, or even 10, so that is not the benchmark for every objective. Other than that I agree with most all of your points, particularly as it applies to most individual traders. However, there are exceptions.
That perspective is to me what the small day-trader wishing to grind it out and the portfolio manager perspective both miss. Allot of trading is just naked opportunism. U find something that works and Milk the living stuffing out of it till it breaks. Most people never grasp that perspective, for whatever reason. If u do that right, after a point all the other bullshit does not matter. U scale back and diversify, etc, if u have common sense. To bring it back to the OP's point - I'd say find a good idea to milk the shit out of till it breaks. Forget about making a living on a small account and boostrap your account. Get the "living" part done and it gets much better.