My experience with the stock market goes back a long way.  While working my way through college, I worked for Harris Upham, a brokerage firm in San Francisco.

As this was prior to the days of online marketing, etc, my job was to transmit and receive stock orders via teletype.  And, which I got pretty good at. More to the point, I gained some keen insight from the trading business just by observing what sort of trades our customers were making.

And because I got to know the account holders pretty well via the brokers, I was able to assign a value on the type and volume of the trades I was transmitting. As resources permitted, I did some investing off and on over the years with good and not so good results.  But the education I was getting was invaluable. Then I got seriously sidetracked by marriage, two children and a mortgage.  But it was all good. And, my wife and I will celebrate our 50th this June 2019.

More to the investing point and experience, about a year ago, my brother in law, got me interested in trading stock options.  More to the point, selling stock options. With my brother in law to coach me, I was able to do pretty well the first four months, and the progress continued, with some losses, as well.