What were your average transaction costs per trade? 1000 to 4000 trades per day, lets say 2500 on average, translates to about 625K transactions per year. I assume you did not have to pay something like ETrades 3$ commission per future contract, which would result in almost 2M of fees per year.

Also don't forget that the total inflation between 1970 and 2000 was 340%, that is 4.03 millions of 2040 dollars would only be worth 0.9 million in todays dollars if history repeats itself.

Yes, but hopefully it doesn't. There was some nasty inflation during that period. It could be worse, it could be better this time around.