Quote from NoDoji:
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Icarus, how many hours did you put in, and how many (if any) books, online resources and/or traders did you study before you had your first six-figure profitable year solely from trading?
When I first got interested in the stock market there was no internet and therefore no internet resources. I knew stockbrokers but no traders. I did read voraciously, however. As an always broke college student, it took me a while to save and open my first discount brokerage account. I can't call what I did those days "trading." It was more like dabbling in the market and I closed my account eventually with a bit less than I started to buy a car.
About a decade later I opened an online account with TD Waterhouse after getting my first job in my profession. Within a month I was up over $100K. From start to finish, I have no idea how many hours that was. I never kept track of the time spent on what I was interested in learning. No doubt it was a lot of hours.
With regard to your question itself, I do not consider it important to anything. There is nothing significant about a six-figure year in trading. I didn't know much when I extracted my first $100K, and I have lost that much in one day a handful of times, though not in many years. Nowadays I keep a small personal account and spend most of my time on accounts of family members.
Trading is a performance activity. Even after figuring out how the market works and organizing the self to extract from it, my experience is I can still do poorly. Poor health, stress from a bad relationship, tax problems, illness and death of a family member...I've gone through all of them and lost a lot of money in the market and in a couple of those times outside the market as well.
Consequently, I have never understood the incessant harping on the "consistently profitable trader" thing I read and hear nowadays. Usually it's the people who think being a trader is making a few hundred bucks a day, day in and day out, like a job, and to them a hundred K a year is some kind of standard for a decent salary, I guess.
What I know is that it's just not possible to always be at my best. Therefore, the important thing isn't what I made in the past, it is to be able to bounce back from future reverses and to keep things in perspective.
In any case, I'm not sure my reply is responsive to your question. Cheers, anyway.
