Your point about the attention required was my takeaway too. I traded paper in college for awhile out of curiosity, and I made a decent amount of "money" doing

Your point about the attention required was my takeaway too. I traded paper in college for awhile out of curiosity, and I made a decent amount of "money" doing it too! I was surprised by this because I thought the stock market was insanely difficult to understand and constantly unpredictable beforehand. It was like that but not as often as I expected. For example, intraday movements could often happen at very predictable times. It can also be very cargo cult. Things like technical analysis seem to work (until they don't) only because enough people believe they will, so the signal to noise ratio can be very hard to suss out. Ultimately the time required and risk tolerance for those moonshot chances just didn't add up.