Not bad, especially considering you were in the pen.
I've been investing for 20 years, and been investing other people's money for 10.
When you do it a long time and see how so many good and not so good things happen, you develop a keen respect / fear of the markets and realize that risk is always there and cannot be totally eliminated, only managed. No matter how good you are or smart you are or how hard you work, you'll be wrong sometimes - whether long, short, with options, commodities, or whatever. And the bigger and more volatile your positions, the bigger the gains AND losses are generally.
I actually day traded for a while when I first got into investing. I had not been out of college very long, had just made $100k on the sale of some property, and I had an ego the size of Mt Rushmore.
It took me a while, but before I lost too much money day trading, I came to the realization that I was not and probably would not be the best ever, and that all that mattered was eventually getting rich while protecting my money. I realized that most of my gains were going to be from day to day based upon what happened or was almost always announced OUTSIDE of market hours - that going to 100% cash at the end of the day every day was cheating me out of lots of gains and eating up big chunks of principal with transaction costs. Then there are taxes.
I eventually came around to investing on fundamentals, which is what I still do with 90-95% of my time and money. I still do the odd day trade when the opportunity presents itself, and I also use puts and calls liberally in my main investment accounts. Mainly bottom-up investing - it's very, very difficult to predict what the broad markets will do - especially short term. Buy on good fundamentals, sell / short on declining fundamentals. Diversify. Use puts to protect downside on more volatile long positions and to short companies that appear overvalued or to otherwise be declining for one reason or another. Calls for upside speculation, covered calls for income.
I've been religiously maxing out my retirement accounts I've had over the years (IRA / 401k / SEP) for nearly 2 decades, and I've put in as much money as I can into my main investment accounts. I dollar cost average into both with weekly cash infusions. My more conservative retirement accounts have averaged roughly 12% over nearly 20 years, and I've done a good 15% in my more aggressive and more volatile main accounts over that same time. I've had the odd triple digit year, and also the odd double digit losing year.
I could retire now at 44 and probably live a very comfortable life IF I was more certain about this country's future. But I'm not, so I keep working. I may leave the US if things keep going in the direction they're going.
used interactive brokers from 07-10.. probably 70% of my profit was from short's. mind you I was in prison at that time and trading by proxy and had to factor in telephone calls into the cost of each trade. usually 3 phone calls per day. initially each call cost me about $4 (long distance about a 7min call), but we figured out how to use Magic Jack so each call was listed as a local call so the cost of each call dropped to less than $2. total cash in the fund was initially about $80k and grew to about $200k with added investments, not counting what was borrowed from IB. I believe during that time I averaged 17% returns after transaction/commissions (ib commission, not mine) (the phone calls came out of my profit, not the funds) of that I took a percentage. I had 3 investors. a friend of mine and his sister and the friends partner (life partner, not biz partner)... tax burden fell on the sister each year.
I got out because my investors pulled out (retired and moved to Israel and wanted funds in a long term div/income account), after they pulled out the sister pulled out as well.... after that I had other stuff to deal with and didn't have the time (or money) to trade. juice wasn't worth the squeeze.
