I'm away so I thought I would answer more viewer mail:

Q: How would one go about getting into day trading/proprietary trading?

A:  Proprietary trading is when you try to make money with your employer's assets (usually with a bank or hedge fund).  Basically, you need to get good grades (from college or business school), go thru the interview process, move up the trading ranks, etc.  Since most of you are playing online poker instead of going to class, this *may* not be for you.

Day trading is something anyone can do if they have an investment account. It's called "day" trading because people generally do multiple trades a day.  Unless you have an extremely strong interest and aptitude in the financial markets, I would not recommend this route.  Investing in financial securities could be a part of anyone's overall investment portfolio, but I prefer people invest with a longer time horizon.  There are numerous reasons for this:

* As previously mentioned, trading is basically is a zero sum game (and in the case of stocks, "zero sum" with respect to the benchmark).  Most studies show that the typical market participant can not beat the "average" - but this should be obvious because it is a zero sum game with costs.  For example, if you look at most large cap mutual funds, they can not beat the S&P (or whatever their benchmark is).  If it looks like there are a lot that outperform, it's only because of survivorship bias - the ones that suck will disappear.  So unless you have a strong interest in the markets, you're better off just investing in the indexes.

* In a zero sum environment, you need to ask yourself, what am I bringing to the game that's better than my competitors?  You have to understand that the big boys in the market actually get to talk to people IN the company (or government) on a regular basis and generally have better resources than you.  They have traders who watch the news tickers, economic announcements, and other timely market-moving data 24 hours a day.  They even write most of the reseach reports you may be looking at.  So right off the bat, you're at a disadvantage.  Where's your edge?

* Most people who day trade use some form of technical analysis as the basis of their frequent trading.  I can tell you that for 99+% of you, this will be useless.  Does it really make sense to you that you're going to find the key to financial outperformance in a book?  Because the the millions of other market participants don't know about this magical book?  Whether it's Elliot wave, stochastics, candlesticks, etc. - you can't make money off of it alone.  Most large institutions either have people or hire people who datamine financial pricing data using super-sophisticated methods.  I even knew a couple of brilliant guys who got certified (yes - there are courses and exams you take) and it made them squat.  Almost all of the several dozen people I've worked with over the years knew technical analysis - but most only watched it because they knew that all the noobs would be watching it.

That having been said, most of you are winning regulars at poker and are therefore good at weighing odds and making decisions, so I'm not trying to discourage you.  In the next few weeks, I'll post some suggestions for people who are interested in the markets.  Not sure what my suggestions are yet, so I need to mull it over.