It was 7.30am. That was when I was in sell side trading, which I did for less than 2 years. As I said earlier in this thread I didn't enjoy working that hard and so I quit (there were other reasons!). Even then I wasn't doing the 70+ hours a week that @southall defines as hard work, more like 50 hours. But I had friends in the investment banking programme who were doing 70 to 100 hours. Now that's hard work. Pretty much all my wealth came from working in a hedge fund, when I had to get in at 9am (normally I was in by 8:30am but then I am a morning person) and I was gone by 5:30pm. A few times a week we took an hour for coffee and lunch probably averaged 45 minutes. So between 40 and 45 hours depending on how you count it. Well, by that point I was already rich. And it's hard for me to define as work something which I find a huge amount of fun. Plus it's a fully automated system, and I run it that way partly because I'm extremely lazy. The thought of staring at a screen for 40 hours a week looking at candlestick charts is thoroughly depressing. Well it's certainly true that if you get lucky and make 10% on your capital, that 10% is a lot more if you already have $1 million. And I guess that as you get richer you get to mix more with rich people* who might bring you opportunities, like the chance to invest with the most exclusive hedge fund managers ("There's this guy I know, really hot manager, very exclusive. Not really taking on new money but as a fellow member of the country club I think I can get you into his fund. His name? Bernie. Bernie Madoff.") * If you want. I usually try and avoid doing this. I'd put that under "advantage" (and if you take a look at the photos of me on the internet, you'll see that I didn't get all the good genes). I was also brought up in a family that had a reasonable amount of money (maybe top 15% of the income distribution, I'm somewhat higher now), and went to a good school, blah blah blah. So by dumb luck, I mean more about being in the right place at the right time and making decisions that at the time looked stupid but with hindsight look correct. Perhaps. I'm fairly tolerant of risk, as I've probably taken more chances in my life. From a financial theory perspective if you take more risk you should get more return. But not that much more. And those chances aren't normally obvious opportunities that have a net positive return if only you'd take a bit more risk. Mostly I took those chances because they seemed like more fun than the other possibilities. That they have worked out to put me in a place where I could arguably be described as successful is, to me at least, a coincidence and therefore dumb luck. GAT
%% LOL=great question.Luck=small sample..................................................................
What about when you start making money from your favourite Hobby. Is it still your favourite Hobby or is it now work?
Do you make money doing it? No one pay me to trade, I do it for fun and for the challenge, and I work harder now than when I had my day job. By the way, I enjoyed reading your posts. Regards,