That's a nice assumption based on my background story. I actually have close to $40,000 in my brokerage. About half of it was saved by purposely driving a shitty 20 year old clunker and maintaining years of little to no debt while saving my money and studying and working thousands of hours of overtime. The other half I earned in the market as a result of my studying. I'm glad you can contribute to charity. I suppose according to liberals I shouldn't be where I am because it doesn't correlate with the struggles I've lived through. How could I have made it without them standing and lifting me up on their shoulders. People such as I are incapable of making it without the help of wealthy white liberals. Except that's not how it works. A series of personal choices are why I am where I am.
You are where you are and it really proves my point. With all that hard work and sacrifice (very commendable) you still barely have enough to get over the PDT hurdle and nowhere enough to trade for a living. For comparison, my first-year bonus when I started trading was more than that, even after taxes. Is it because I am better than you are somehow? Not really, but I do come from a well-educated family and a lot of my success in life can be traced to my background.
Most choices in life are theoretical and are subject to the whims of fate. Take yourself as an example, you could have
- studied well in your public school (free, just a matter of effort)
- gone to an Ivy League college (again, free if you are poor)
- majored in CS and finance (again, possible if you work hard)
- went to work at Citadel or Tower Research (possible if you have Ivy League and C++ on your CV)
With all of the above, you are almost guaranteed to be very comfortable and have a buck or two set aside for retirement by the time you are 30. You probably would be a portfolio manager by now, taking home high 6 or low 7 figures, based on nothin aside from hard work and sacrifice. You can substitute whatever other road to success (me - liked science and computers, did a physics PhD, got an offer from a bank, moved to hedge fund etc) and it all sounds like smart choices were made.
However, we have a tendency to discount the path dependency in out lives - when you were 14, you did not even think about this career path. So once you made a single wrong choice at step 1, the rest of the choices were cut off. For example, the probability of getting a trading job at a Tier 1 fund or a bank without an top tier education is very low.
To conclude my TLDR - it's hard to argue that starting point matters. Someone who inherits a billion dollars can take a lot of risk and never be close to actually being poor. Someone who is born poor would have trouble risking a thousand dollars even on a relatively sure bet. The real question is how do we equalize opportunity in the society and I don't think either conservatives nor liberals have come up with a good answer to that.
