Do you get a significant portion of your income from trading something?

If so, what is life like on days you trade? What do you trade? How did you learn to trade it? Did you do well at first? What keeps you doing this? What is it about your personality, do you think, that makes you enjoy this work?

I can’t imagine being a trader. Or a gambler, for that matter. I’m not really fond of risk. I prefer to make money doing things I have more apparent control over. I traded a bit of stocks during the internet boom, but I really had no idea what I was doing, so I lost a lot of money in the end. Fortunately, my wife had the sense to only let me play with a little bit of our money.

I think it takes a certain something to be willing to put a lot of money on the belief that your analysis is good. I suppose, some people really are just gambling, and they just get lucky. Others get PhDs and then write computer programs to do their trading. And of course, large companies do this. But what makes an individual try their hand, competing with the big boys?