Thanks. I recommend everyone who are interested in trading options go dig up all the old posts of Maverick74 and read them very very carefully. You will benefit tremendously if you can understand what he said. If you have time to kill, read the others too.
Trial and error it is for me as well. Patience, timing, risk and risk management, reward expectations are lessons I learnt. The userlist posted by @ironchef is good. I remember reading good posts from lots of them.
You can start with this thread, read posts #12, 13...... https://www.elitetrader.com/et/threads/writing-options-for-a-living.53037/page-2
This post of yours deserves a thread of its own. There's a lot to unpack here, and you have untold hours involved, no doubt, to compile that list.
This group affected the way I trade the most. Many are professionals and I am quite sure most if not all of them are very successful in their own right. There are many others who are damn good traders but their posts were way too technical (math, statistics, coding, financial theories, economics...) way over my head for me to appreciate them.
Really, there are far to many for me to remember them all. But, Gary Phillips is a standout. Gary began trading in 1971, and learned how to trade from futures industry legends, Leo Melamed, Tom Dittmer, and Barry Lind. At the age of 23, he became one of the youngest members of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, trading livestock and foreign currency futures. In 1979 he left the CME, to trade 30 Year Treasury Bond Futures at the Chicago Board of Trade, purchased a membership at the CBOT in 1982, and for the next 25 years, was a consistently profitable trader, in the largest and most volatile futures pit in the world. Gary functioned as a market maker, day trader, and position trader, trading front month bonds, calendar and yield curve spreads, bond options, and grains. That's the kind of credentials that should impress you.
My first mentor outside of my family was an older attorney who was a friend of the family. Unpretentious fellow, I’ve written about him here before. I watched him increase his trading account 10 fold over about 10 years. He lived in a typical house in a small rural farming town. The carpet had worn through to the cement under it forming a path going from the front door to the kitchen. He’d take a scissors and trim the edges so people wouldn’t trip on it. He would rather have his money make money than buy a new carpet. Didn’t worry about what people thought about him. He had been a judge in the Nuremburg trials. He saw a lot that perhaps changed what he valued in life. In a similar vein, one of the local farmers had the bumper on his car tied on with bailing wire. Everyone laughed at him. When he died they were shocked to find out he – starting out about the same as the rest of them -- was worth multiples of any of them. I took classes from Robert Kiyosaki, Al Brooks, a couple others. In my experience, the more someone charges, they less value they have. In the final analysis, you do the internal work yourself or you don’t. This may not apply to everyone, as I am only interested in discretionary day trading.
i will teach you if you want to learn. i will give you your fitst lesson for free! i am not a coach or a mentor by trade. i have never charged anyone ever and im not a commercial account on this sight for free. watch the movie karate kid the original one. that is your first free lesson and as u watch it gently apply it to yourself and trading