Thanks for starting this very interesting topic, swingtraderkk! It's so interesting, that I bookmarked it immediately, based only on your first post, to come back read later when I finally acquire knowledge needed to answer some of the very interesting questions you open.

Now, I'm still learning about lots of important money management concepts, I'm fitting the pieces of the puzzle in my mind, so to say. But, it will take a while before I can say I even grasp the general concepts, let alone master the subject.

jcl has obviously made his homework and shared with us some usable general conclusions, but it's up to us to understand them completely and apply them properly. And this all is even more important if you plan to live just off of trading profits. I'd say, don't ever do that (quit the day job) before you really have all of your questions answered. And able to recite them seamlessly when woken up in the middle of the night.

Now, *if* we're to take jcl's "don't ever reinvest more than square-root of your profits" advice as granted, I guess (i.e. I'm not yet sure) we could translate it to "risk a fixed sum (not percentage!), and draw only a square-root of your profits, and you should be fine". Then, depending on the profitability of your strategy and your expected monthly expenses, you should be able to roughly estimate the needed starting capital for all this to work and you be able to quit your day job. That's how I see it, currently.

Of course, you'd also need to build in lots of safety margins, because market can surprise you, and your strategy can be 3 months in drawdown, but you still need to eat and pay for the electricity all that time, right? So the starting capital needed could be much larger than calculated by naive mathematics formulas, to provide cushion in adverse times.

Nassim Taleb's books are good if you wan't to be scared s**tless of the market. You get to see your boss in another light after you read what Nassim has to say.