I appreciate everyone's posts. I should let people know I am not entirely new to trading. I started out life in banking, but I couldn't stand the salesmanship required. I am a terrible salesman and hate all aspects of sales as a profession. I left banking 6 months after getting licensed.
I do however know how to trade, and banking is literally in my blood. My whole family for generations has been in trade of one sort or another whether stock market, insurance or real estate. The difference is that I am literally starting over after loosing all my savings to getting married and raising a family, owning 3 homes, and a wife that doesn't want to venture anything we do have left.
I am therefore starting out with savings I have saved from my personal slush fund that isn't taking anything from the household budget, and plan on growing the account until I can free myself from employment and work on it and my families future full time.
I simply restated the question because so many people have said they can trade for a living on a tiny sum of money, but when you look at the regulations, it couldn't even be possible in most cases unless one were consistently lucky to pick stocks that swing 200% after they are picked.
Personally I don't plan on scalping, I plan on doing a blend of day trading and swing trading, and on paper (I know its not the same thing), I seem to consistently do about 10% performance per week. I have had some really bad trades on paper, but in the end it seems to balance in my favor. Does that mean I can do it full time? I don't know, but that's the point of starting out small. If I can perform small, then I certain can perform a little bigger considering its harder to surmount commisions and fees with when trading under $5000. At $1000, you are stuck cash only, and fees hover around 1.3% on average, plus you can only trade once every 3-4 days on a cash only account. So you need to have picked a good stock to trade that will exceed the fees. Once you exceed $2000 after closing your positions and letting them settle, you can convert to a margin account, you still have the same fees, but the percentage is half, so its easier to surmount the fees, and you can trade 4:1 margin to cash ratio, meaning if I understand it correctly you can trade all your money 4 times a day so long as you can make your equity calls. If you can't make your equity calls, you account is forced to wait settlement before you can behave with pattern day trading activities again.
Once you break the $25,000 barrier, you aren't subject to the 4:1 ratio equity calls so long as you don't loose money that forced a standard margin equity call.
So..after that long winded explanation of what I want to do, and what I understand so far, the summary is...I plan on building it slowly in order to not risk so much, and prove my performance with less money so I have more confidence when larger amounts of money are at risk and I am capable of managing the risks appropriately.
