If you've really worked in that field than it's very surprising you've never heard about what professional poker players call bankroll management (and they "stole" the concept from professional traders).

The whole point is that you can --either if you gain an edge or get lucky-- win big. Very big. But you're never exposing a large part of your funds in the process.

Maybe OP had an overall "stop loss" at, say, $10K. Had he had five minus $2K days in a row at the start, he'd be out. He wouldn't be broke. He wouldn't be without a car and without a bank account. He just would have lost $10K.

But there's no upper limit as to how much you can win.

All you need is discipline and sound bankroll management.

And, yes, I've won a five-digits figure (hence not anywhere near what OP did) real $$$ at online poker. Starting from $0.01/$0.02 small blind/big blind tables and then working my way up using bankroll management.

It's assymetric. You're foolish if you think that succesful traders who won $x were as likely to lose $x. This is simply not how it works and it's very well explained in OP's article. He's detailing what his maximal daily exposure was and it was tiny compared to what he made.