Reddit reviews Mastering the Trade, Third Edition: Proven Techniques for Profiting from Intraday and Swing Trading Setups

That's an interesting conjecture, and a topic worthy of thoughtfully probing in the main forum.

I too would be interested in creating, or seeing created a poll for an unscientific measure of the demographics of the population here.

I would be inclined to believe, without much evidence, that there is a very mixed population participating in options, with some more visible, and many less visible.

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It is certainly the case that mobile applications and brokerages with low or no cost commission attract a population that is willing to risk money, in ignorance, small personal funds, and a population that does not yet know how easy it is to lose their money in a big way.

The rise in this forum's participants from 30,000 members to 70,000 members in the last couple of years is, I speculate, partially driven by easy access to mobile applications and their promotion. This newby forum is an effort to deal with the influx of those who are learning.

Those who wrote books were often floor traders, and were the only ones in the know about a lot of lore and theory of options; electronic trading has really changed that as the face-to-face options trading floors evaporated over the last 20 years, and modern internet media has made the threshold for publishing radically different in the last 20 years as well.

To well-organize the useful experiences one has had, perhaps it takes 10 years of trading, and the maturity of 35 years of age, to have the confidence to know their views are worth the difficulty of putting into print. I don't know how old John Carter is, probably now in his late 40s; perhaps he wrote his book
when he was in his early 30s, published in 2005 (now forthcoming in 3rd edition) Mastering the Trade.

Yet also Websites like OptionAlpha or the podcast series Chat with Traders could be considered future books, by distilling the voluminous information collected there, if they don't forever reside in their existing media form.

I note that current advertisements for Etrade, TDAmeritrade, Scwhab, Merrill Lynch, and Fidelity, and Fischer, seen on channels like MSNBC are targeting the population that has assets to play with, from say age 40 to 75.

Anton Kreil describes a perennial problem of brokers needing to recruit new customers, and creating a path for new clients to sign on, after a significant fraction their current population of clients have dwindled away their assets as a consequence of learning how (not) to trade.

We may be witness that attrition yet.