How do I turn that into 1 million?

I'm a self-employed contractor, have been at it for over 10 years.

My strong point is learning complex things from scratch, on my own and quickly. I'm an autodidact and a college dropout. Judging by the amount of money I made from programming over the years, I'd say I'm a pretty good programmer. I'm driven by a quest for knowledge and I'm a voracious reader.

I'm quite tenacious and often seek perfection. I once rewrote a compiler from a trading language to C# in Haskell, OCaml and Lisp.

My weak point is that I get bored quickly, otherwise I would have developed an app and sold it already. My other weak point is that I love to work alone and hate lots of people around. Last but not least, I take a hedonist approach to programming and only take on projects that please me. I'm fine on the Mac, for example, and wouldn't go to Windows even if it made me money.

Trading is fun and interests me. I would also love to learn electronics, with an eye towards low-power gadgets on sailboats. I love sailing and will take August off to sail and get a RYA coastal skipper qualification. I'm also interested in robotics and embedded bits, although that's related to electronics.

I live in Tenerife (Canary Islands, Spain) and would love to flip real estate but I'm afraid 100K won't carry me far. I'm married and have two daughters. I rent but paid cash for a recent BMW last year.

I'm thinking that trading may be my best bet. My first trade was back in 1996 when I was working at Bear Stearns and AOL announced unlimited dialup. I drew about 700 bucks from my credit card and bought two AOL calls (different months). My bet was that AOL will dominate the competition in the short term and I was up to over 2K in a month or so. Then AOL ran out of capacity and I was back to my 700 bucks after paying about 200 in commission to Bear.

I also bought 5K worth of APPL calls before Apple announced the iPhone. I had 12.5K less than two weeks later. Unfortunately, I rolled the profits into more calls to speculate on the following APPL earnings announcement. The iPhone bit was the big news, though, earnings did not matter and volatility dropped off. I got out with the same 5K I started with.

I tried small scale straddling and strangling (options) around earnings announcement but lost a bit of money. I also lost around 1.5K day-trading trading S&P 500 and Russell 2000 e-mini futures.

I think there are plenty of opportunities for careful market speculation, particularly around events (BP oil spill?). I'm going through dozens of trading books and certainly won't repeat my amateur mistakes above.

I'm pretty content with what I have and use. I can't find a pressing need to develop something for myself and I can usually put up with my tools (Emacs, Erlang from the command-line).

I work alone at home and thus have a hard time spotting inefficient business processes. It was much better when I worked on Wall St, for example. I tried to launch a Securities Lending platform in 1997 but I guess I was way ahead of my time.

I also sold trading software full-time for a year, on a 30% commission. I found that existing trading software imposes the need to program on people who don't want it. Think making a non-programmer develop trading models in C#!

A wise friend, an experienced businessman, suggested that the only way to have a chance in hell to grow those 100k in to "bet on yourself" one way or the other.

Any other suggestions?

http://www.linkedin.com/in/joelreymont