"trading" is incredibly straightforward tbh...especially in a rampant fraud-everything bubble (happens everytime republicans are in power), you might as well learn how to grab a piece of that pie so you can put your time towards the stuff that actually matters.
$ is free and infinite, time by comparison is the most precious resource any of us has.
read Reminiscences of a Stock Operator if you want to get the hang of "trading", then read up on the black-scholes equation amd it's implications when considering rule-differences between US and the rest of the worlds markets. (hint...it's one big rigged casino, that a bunch of degenerate gamblers are mostly throwing their $ into mindlessly). figure out an edge that beats 50/50 consistently and stick to a budget and you have infinite passive income
if you do it right, you don't have to watch the tickers all day. and you dont want to do that...the US markets are setup as a casino, to be "exciting". if you watch em constantly instead of trading by set rule/system, you will get a gambling addiction. the end goal is to just set your trades/alerts (or algo, once you get really advanced...which requires learning some basic code, funnily enough) and go about your day.
I didn't want to have a debate with people who don't consider trading as gambling
Trading is for people who enjoy adrenaline. Coding is for people who enjoy solitude. Who are you?
Kinda depends on what you want to do with either, as that's a pretty general question. I'm a software engineer primarily full stack web development, and my brother is a day trader, mainly dealing with forex and futures.
If you want to make money, trading probably has a more immediate return, but is a lot more risky, and kinda needs a bit of capital to start. Where as coding might be harder to find "work", but will probably be more stable income once you find a work stream.
Coding has an immensely large amount of different things you can do. It's a generically good tool for problem solving, and it's always good to understand more about how our ever technologically growing world works.
It's also very important to know how you think. From my experience, people who enjoy math and logic puzzles also enjoy coding. But people who enjoyed other subjects in school like chemistry or literature might not find the way of thinking that coding takes to be very enjoyable.