Full time trading does it really pay

This was a typical bit of Howie straw man building actually. Nobody was remotely interested in the total size of his investment pot.

Straw man---me? You have not read my previous posts to Howard on other threads.

What I do say is that when some posters do not understand an investing process of another poster, other tactics emerge which have nothing to do with the subject, at all.

Howard is not understood by me, so I leave him alone. I do not profess to be interested in what he does, ie. options, let alone understand him but I'm sure that he will live through that inconvenience.

No, not you building a straw man - Howie doing it. It's one of his favourite hobbies.

From Wiki (I found it interesting .. )

Example

Straw man arguments often arise in public debates such as a (hypothetical) prohibition debate:
Person A: We should liberalize the laws on beer.
Person B: No, any society with unrestricted access to intoxicants loses its work ethic and goes only for immediate gratification.
The proposal was to relax laws on beer. Person B has exaggerated this to a position harder to defend, i.e., "unrestricted access to intoxicants".[1] This example is also a slippery slope fallacy.
Another example:
Person A: Our society should spend more money helping the poor.
Person B: Studies show that handouts don't work; they just create more poverty and humiliate the recipients. That money could be better spent.
In this case, Person B has specified Person A's position (more funding) into "more handouts", which is easier for Person B to defeat.

Howard I think you just refuse to admit being a gambler

I hear this about home based traders quite often.
If you do not have any self motivation and you need someone to tell you when to start work, when and what to study, etc., then you are not going to succeed in any home-based business (trading included).
In any unsupervised job, business or venture you need to be motivated and have self discipline and working from home is no different.
Sadly many people today do not have that ethic and therefore firms who employ them still require them to show up for work every day even though they perform work very well suited for working from home and would save money if they did.

I work from home. I wasn't always profitable but I kept at it until I was.

Ok, sorry that I got that one wrong.

I thought that a man of straw bent with the prevailing wind.

Hi I started trading in 1988, for an Investment Bank and then from 1993 to present managing my own funds. It is not an easy career, albeit it is very rewarding when things go well. The last three months have been very volatile at a micro (short-term) level in most asset classes so i would not get too despondent if your top and tailing occurred during this period.

I have a rather large network of professional traders working across the industry covering most types of firm and roles and we speak most mornings to discuss our ideas and positions. When a consensus is found the trade is invariably correct so i believe we all benefit from such discussion and when we dont have time to conference we post on our blog which is then used as a journal and medium to throw ideas around whilst retaining a log of prices and thoughts which often prove invaluable at a later date.

I would recommend writing a journal each time you trade detailing the price of associated assets and your thoughts and emotions at the time. Over time this will build up to encyclopedic amounts in which at your next trade you will have detailed notes on a near identical trade taken in the past and your reasons and emotions at the time. I assure you this is massively confidence boosting. Personally i print off a chart for each trade and make notes on it which means that i havent entered or exited a trade for probably 15 years that i hadn't "seen before!"

Good luck