Quote from aphexcoil:
Honestly, I view trading as gambling. I came into it thinking that it would be easy and I learned some great lessons in the process. I'm not the smartest, fastest, sharpest or most experienced of the pact, so I'm just another money-tree for some market-maker or exchange to shake.
Most of the people who go into trading usually have the excess money to blow -- its like slots but a lot more personalized. Its better than a casino because you can tailor it to your personality. Don't like stocks? No problem -- trade options, futures on stocks, futures on options, options on futures, currencies, commodities. Arb, hedge and buy and sell all damn day and week -- its the best.
However, when the account statement came in and I was losing money, I realized I was blowing sunshine up my own ass and decided to quit trading for awhile. I'm just not ready for it and I'm undercapitalized. If you want to get rich trading, you can just about forget it -- unless you're in a position to do something illegal like use inside info to place a bet.
If you're just some Joe Schmoe behind a few flat-panels and a $99 subscription to eSignal and a new account with IB, you can have a lot of fun playing with the system. You might actually have a great start -- just enough to keep your money in the game until it bleeds out through commissions and other excess trading costs and losses.
In the end, you'll end up as another statistic -- but the best part is you get to tell others that you were an active participant of modern free-economics, which is pretty cool.
I just hang around the investing / trading community because there are a lot of cool people with big egos and interesting opinions -- I certainly don't hang out looking for a holy-grail anymore (there is none -- its a sophisticated system that only a very small percentage of people can truly understand -- and only after losing their asses a few times).