First I’ll start by saying its very unfortunate that you lost your life savings. I hope you are able to recoup your losses in another way and hopefully move on the path toward recovery. I suspect you are not the only one in this situation and maybe you can draw on the experiences of others to aid yourself in the recovery process.
I can say, through my time trading I’ve had my ups and downs including starting with a $500 account, dropping down to $30 and then bringing myself back up to being profitable. I lost money learning how to trade mainly because I didn’t take advantage of the demo accounts long enough. BUT! The way I was able to bring myself back up into being profitable was through risk management. It’s highly likely you had some combination of poor risk management and bad judgement in trading that caused you to lose your life savings. It’s highly likely it wasn’t the industry but instead it was you. When you are able to trade in such a way that all your gains outpace your losses, you are unable to lose your life savings. This is done through setting the proper stops and gaining experience at estimating them (in my opinion). When i started setting stops and limits and sticking to them, i started making money. When I was gambling, i was losing money. Odds are, you were gambling. The leverage didn’t take your life savings.
For example if your stops are on average 10% of your limits, your P/L ratio is favorable assuming you dont make a ton of bad trades in a row which you shouldn’t be doing anyway if you have taken the proper steps to learn how to trade.