The Part-Time Trader (2 page)

I
had not always planned to become a full-time trader. Though I started trading at a young age, I always assumed I would just hold a normal job like everyone else. I did not know any full-time traders, nor did I have any friendships with those I would consider to be entrepreneurs.

I had a pretty good start to my career in writing contracts. Essentially, it required me to derive agreements between us and another entity that addressed all those boring terms and conditions, pricing, and the kind of product that we would be receiving. Sometimes I got to put on my Jerry Maguire hat and do a little negotiating of my own.

In other jobs, I had worked on Capitol Hill as an intern [insert derogatory joke here]. I graduated from an in-state college with high honors, but failed to land a job with my political science degree during an interview in the West Wing of the White House. That dot-com bubble started to burst, and with a pretty heavy recession under way, so it made sense to take any job that was willing to pay, even if the only thing I knew about contracts was the two-year commitment my phone carrier suckered me into.

I was on the fast track, and as one of my many bosses (yes, we had group leaders, managers, senior managers, program managers, and contract managers all hovering over us) put it, I was a “rising star” in the organization. In fact, less than a year into the job, I won the employee of the year award in this S&P 500 company for my “dedication” to teamwork after being part of a four-man team traveling to Indiana to help save a procurement system that had gone awry.

To be honest, I only signed up because they said I would get paid to eat three meals a day for the next two weeks on the company tab; fly on an airplane, which I had not done since I was 12; and get to stay in a hotel that had an indoor swimming pool.

The concept of the company picking up nearly everything during my time on the road was a foreign concept that later became known to me as
per diem
, (pronounced
). So I got to go to Indiana during the heart of winter and call a bunch of people, explaining to them we did not mean to buy the “widgets” and “gadgets” our system accidentally ordered on our behalf. I went from being a contracts guy to crisis management. Throughout those long days, I managed to work my way through them because I would get my extra paycheck, requiring me to eat at the likes of McDonald's for breakfast, the Piggly Wiggly for lunch, and Ruby Tuesday's for dinner.

Then, to top it all off, I came back home to my southern dwellings as some sort of hero of our Indiana branch for essentially doing the same tasks that I would've done back home without getting paid extra to eat while doing it.

And that is how I became your corporate hero in year one, by being a stellar example of Teamwork Leadership in action.

Sure, the other candidate for the award happened to be some engineer that found a new way to split an atom, but yours truly stuffed his face with food at the local hog trough and happened to cancel a few bogus purchase orders in the process. As a result of all of this, I appeared to be some kind of “Team Player” to the powers that be.

Oh, yes, I guess it would help, too, that the vice president presiding over our organization was more interested in making his division look better than the rest, and yes, he was also a voting member (I later learned that conflicts of interest can be quite acceptable in the corporate world), and yes I got a crystal statue plus a $3,000 check! But that money was spent as fast as I could cash it because my guest at the award banquet happened to be a nice young blonde that I had been dating for a few years, and I had the itch to get a ring on her finger before somebody else did.

It was at that one and only moment of corporate greatness that I actually could see myself working for this company for maybe the rest of my career. Sad to say, that rising star I spoke of happened to sparkle just a little too soon.

From that time on I started a steady decline, not from a performance standard, because I actually did a good job at what I did, but more from a “this-job-sucks-and-there-has-to-be-something-that-is-better-to-do-with-my-life-than-this” perspective.

Let's just say it took me a while to figure what that was.

During the housing boom, a friend of mine, during one of our regular Monday lunches at a local spaghetti shop, proposed that we start building a house from the ground up and sell it for a HUGE profit. This close friend of mine, Nate Walker, said, “we will be swimming in cash,” and to illustrate what he meant, he took an entire stack of napkins out of the dispenser at our table and tossed them up in the air.

I was sold on the idea.

The idea of buying and selling houses like everyone else was doing was music to my ears. Let's go find ourselves a plot of dirt and start building. His brother, Marcus, jumped right in with us, and we were off to the races. Luckily, Marcus was an engineer who could act as our general contractor. He pulled the permits; we got the house plan; we found people who would clear our land and another outfit that could install the septic and eventually contract having the walls and a roof installed. We did as much as we could on our own. To say the least, it was some major sweat equity we were putting into that house, with the belief that the napkins we had tossed in the air before would somehow morph into big-time cash and a new way of life for all three of us going forward. This was just the start.

It did not quite go according to the way we planned it. Someone happened to get shot and killed down the street from where we were building. I learned there's nothing better than driving by a the chalk outline of a bloody dead man in someone's driveway as your realtor goes on to show you your future “dream home” just a few doors down.

We also had the neighbor's 13-year-old, who regularly shoveled his Rottweiler's poop onto our roof for his own kicks and giggles; pit bulls that managed to chase us to our cars on a regular basis; neighbors on the other side of us who painted their house hot pink; and a realtor who figured out some way to “adjust” his payout on the house for selling it without my knowing it.

We had bought the quarter acre of land for $56,000, and by the time we had finished building the house, we had two credit lines maxed out and almost $225,000 invested in the house. Had we only been able to short our own housing investment like I do with stocks, then that eventual sale price of $175,000 would've made for a great investment. Unfortunately, though, we were long and strong on a losing investment.

One of the biggest turn-offs with real estate, besides the obvious monstrosity of a loss for me, was the liquidity difference between it and a stock. Fortunately, you can choose to invest only in liquid companies, and if the trade goes wrong, you can immediately get out of it for a loss. With real estate, you have to hold on to it; pay for upkeep, ungodly sums of taxes, and inspections; and guard against others making it even worse for you (like cold-blooded murder down the street).

We actually managed to keep costs under control, and if we were selling a house somehow without the land that we purchased to build it on, we might have been able to actually make a profit. Unfortunately, we had a piece of property that was worth about 1,000 percent more when we bought it than what it was appraised at when we sold it. That $56,000 land value was better valued at $5,000 a little over two years after we had bought it. Just to make things even better for us, we would later learn that the town that we chose to build our investment home in was one of the worst-hit foreclosure areas in the United States when that hyped-up real estate bubble finally did burst.

The only thing that gave me peace of mind is that in the misery of my real estate investment at the peak of the housing bubble, the losses were split three ways. I was quick to conclude, though, that I could cross real estate, homebuilding, and shoveling dog poop off of my list of career options to get me out of Corporate America.

Fortunately, during that same time, I had reignited my passion for stocks and trading in the financial markets.

There are five classes of workers in Corporate America that I have come to learn. The first class represents those who embrace the politics of the workplace, the hierarchy, the rules, regulations, and processes that outline a job and the company at large. These individuals will typically bend over backwards to be noticed and to gain recognition, acceptance, and an additional title to their job description. Moreover, many of them will stab you in the back the first chance they get, and sometimes they will even spin you around, look you in the eye, and do the same to you from the front side, smiling while they turn the knife.

In the long run, these people's aspirations and questionable tactics will often take them far in the company and find them on that enviable “fast-track” list to the top of the company.

Eventually, though, these same aspirations that served them well over the years will run them amok, as they will leave one too many bodies in their path, and that path will lead right to their own door-step. But those who can avoid this mishap will become chief executive officers, chief financial officers, presidents, and vice presidents. For the purposes of this book, I'll give the name “Edward” to this particular type of employee.

The second class comprises much of those same characteristics of the first class, but with one simple caveat: they have no chance at making it to the top, but they will spend an entire career trying to prove to themselves and to others that they can.

These types of people are brutal to be around. They are miserable and make those who have the unfortunate pleasure of working with them absolutely dejected. I had to work and try to get along with plenty of these types in my short corporate career. These are the types that have no problem throwing morals to the wind and ethics out the window when it comes to playing nice with coworkers. They will lie, cheat, and steal from you and everyone else.

I have a passionate distaste for these individuals because they represent the majority of those individuals that soured me on life in Corporate America and only flamed my desire to find a way out of it. Whatever you do, never trust these individuals, what they say, or what they tell you they are going to do because in all likelihood it is a facade of lies simply used to bait you into completing their agenda for self-gain.

These types of employees view their coworkers and those who work underneath them as their tools in a borderline sadistic kind of way. They are hell-bent on doing what satisfies them and realize a sense of accomplishment when they witness the misery of those for whom they are responsible. In fact, I would surmise that they probably get some kind of “rise” out of pushing people around and to the brink of seeing them lose it.

I would often try to make small talk with these individuals, believing that if I could get to know them on a personal level, that they would somehow take it easy on me, and not be such a royal head-case to work with. But I could not be more wrong.

Instead of forming some kind of camaraderie with the individual, they would turn on a dime if it suited their needs. And the most disturbing aspect of it is that they didn't seem to be troubled by it. Instead, they felt a sense of empowerment by it—like they knew you hated them, but they were content on simply flexing their muscles to demonstrate to you that they still wore the pants. For the purposes of this chapter and later ones, we will call this particular individual “Debbie.”

The third type of worker is probably as close as one can be to having the status of neutral. They are nonthreatening and try to do what is fair. They'll work an entire career, or close to it, for just one company. They are trusting and can be trusted. If they are your boss, life isn't bad. The problem is that they are hard to find. I had the rare opportunity to work for three of them. The drawback is that they can be pushed around some. While they are loyal, they will do whatever the person above them tells them to do. They thrive off of staying out of the limelight and controversy in general.

There was a time that I was able to show documented proof that a certain manager outside of my job function was lying about what I had done while working with him. When I laid out for my boss exactly how he had been lied to, he refused to act on it simply because the manager in question was friends with a vice president. Instead, I was awarded with a black mark on my record and the one likelihood that any promotion I was hoping for would be derailed by at least an additional three years, simply because intervening on my behalf would have required potential discomfort for the manager I served.