Quote from garachen:
I'm kind of reluctantly posting this because I fear motivating the wrong people. Just because some people have success with trading doesn't mean that it's easy, or even attainable at all, for the majority. Of course there are many reasons for that. Luck. Timing. Personality. Patience. Fallback plan. Spousal support. Intelligence. It's a long list with many factors not very controllable.
This field is full of smart people. Most people overestimate their intelligence. I certainly did - but then had the fortune to work with a group of russian ex-physics PhD quants in a very technical environment early in my career. I found that if I took a day to really think about it I could get to the point where I could understand the question that they were trying to solve. It gave me a new perspective. I'm not saying that you have to be that level of smart or that those people would be good traders. My point is, that they are out there doing .... stuff... and at some level they form part of the competition. Many people who are not smart enough never ask enough (or the correct) questions.
With that caveat, I'll tell a piece of my story.
While working for a modest sized hedge fund (about $5B) I met a coworker who was a serial entrepreneur. We became friends and would often take walks together. He taught me a lot about how to view income as 'stages' and how you have to do different things to get to the next stage. Another thing that always stuck with me is that he would say "Garachen, if you live in America and your goal is to make money and you haven't hit $1M by the age of 25 then you are not really trying." He'd then say. "Anyone in America can make $1M. It's trivial. $10M is harder. $100M is quite hard and $1B takes a lot of luck."
At the time, this frustrated me. I was 25 and had only saved about $150K. Thought I was doing at least reasonably well - but apparently I wasn't "really trying". He'd motivate me with stories of how he made his first Million, then the next ten, fifty and so on. There's a lot of good story here that I'm skipping. Suffice it to say, he motivated me to quit my job at the hedge fund and try a different approach.
My first year of manual trading I took that $150K to $50K (broker theft) and on to 800K by the end of the year. I traded almost exclusively illiquid futures contracts at a time when there was absolutely no automation on those contracts. It was a golden era. Still, it's not too different from what I'd expect today. I've generally found that when I hire a new person with no trading experience I should expect them to make about $1K/day using max 25K margin after about 3 months of floundering. Of course everyone can't pull this off. During the interview process I pretty heavily screen for personality traits that I think are important for trading so I end up with people who can resonate with my particular, very risk averse, style.
One last thing. Before that friend I'd met, I'd always heard that "the first million is hard, the next 10 are easy". My friend was telling me the opposite which is closer to my experience. I have found the process of reaching different income levels to be much closer to the 'stages' my friend described and that I've had to do material different things to get to the next stage. It's important while you are at one stage to be able to visualize and lay the groundwork for the next.