What it calculates per hour as a job has nothing to do with anything; you said 10k wasn't enough to overcome fees, that's absurd, 10k is plenty to invested and get a healthy return from and far better than 30% annually, hell I made 35% last month and I didn't work an hour for it. Beat the market is a meaningless scare tactic used by those that don't understand being small has enormous advantages over being large and "the market" returns are what large institutions struggle to beat, small traders destroy the market constantly because being small is easier. Returns decrease as capital increases so it doesn't scale up.
> You'd need to have a huge edge (extremely unlikely) to make money after fees with only $10k.
No you don't. 10k is plenty to make money, equities aren't the only market and paying the spread is trivial. Beyond that you're overestimating the time it takes; what do I care how many CPU cycles my computer spends watching the market? For a programmer, algo trading is trivially easy and a fun hobby so that time isn't work anyway and it's only a few hundred lines of code to work up a strategy, it's not exactly a big investment of time.
Side jobs require my time, robots don't, they aren't comparable. I'm better off working no side job and letting a robot earn money on the side because that's simply better even if the bot earns less than I would on a side job. Selling labor is not economically preferable to free money.
