The Part-Time Trader (21 page)

Another benefit, as mentioned in earlier chapters, is that if you live on the East Coast of the United States, the further west you fly, the more hours you will have to be an active market participant in the mornings before you would typically have to start working.

I always enjoyed flying out to Oregon and California because the market opened up much earlier in the morning when I was in their time zone. So there were plenty of opportunities, depending on the location, that allowed me to benefit from the time change and actually experience brief moments of being completely focused on the markets without the encumbering job requirements.

If you are not a fan of flying during market hours because you do not want to be disconnected from your existing positions, then consider flying during non–market hours when you are worried about your current positions. This is much easier to do living closer to the West Coast than on the East, as the market closes earlier and allows for you to still travel during business hours. However, on the East Coast, this is much more difficult to accomplish unless you want to fly in the evening. I was never a big fan of this because I'd rather be settling into my hotel at night, instead of having my private areas groped by the TSA at the security lines.

I do not necessarily think that this needs to be etched in stone, but traveling with open positions in the market does carry an additional level of risk simply because you may not always be able to have access to the financial markets when they are being actively trading, and if I had to vote one way or the other, I would vote against adding new positions right before you leave on a business trip.

With your existing positions, you already have an idea for their tendencies and how they are likely to act. If it is a stock that you are not as familiar with, there is a level of “unknown” that you are playing with, not only with the individual stock but the fact that you are adding risk to your portfolio with more capital committed. If you can sell out of a stock for reasons that make sense to your style of trading, then it might not be a bad idea to do so, considering it will lessen your risk exposure to your capital while you are unable to be at the helm.

I also strongly encourage traders, when traveling, to use their time at night in the hotels to their benefit. If you have a family back at home, sometimes the evenings can be a difficult time to get a lot of research and studying done on the market. However, when traveling, often you are holed up in your hotel with nothing much to do. Use that time to read, research, and strategize.

One time I went on a business trip to New Jersey. We got in pretty late that night (sometimes you do not have an option about when you can travel when flights get delayed). We found the only place that looked like it would satisfy our appetite. In this case, it was Red Lobster, and I am a huge fan of their cheese biscuits. I am pretty sure they were running their all-you-can-eat shrimp deal that night, and to say the least, there must have been a shrimp that was not quite agreeable with my stomach, because the rest of the night I spent bear-hugging the bathroom toilet in my hotel room.

I did not get much sleep at all, and when the sun rose and I met up with the team, they asked me what happened. They told me to stay back (out of fear that it was some kind of shrimp virus that they might all catch), and I offered no resistance.

I actually did not feel all that bad, since by then I had the food out of my system. Later that morning I started feeling much better, and it gave me an entire day to trade the markets and enjoy some time doing extra research, creating new scans, and even some reading to myself. I think it was the best day I ever had on the job. In fact, I was tempted to figure out how I could get food poisoned every time I traveled if it meant I could hang out in the hotel all day.

Rule of thumb:
Never tell the boss man you have nothing to do—particularly if you are bent on becoming a full-time trader. This can kill you, not literally, but certainly for trading successfully. Always do what they ask you to do, but in my opinion, it is the boss man's job to determine the workload, and it is your job to get it done as fast as you can, so you can focus your energies on more important matters.

Here's what happens when you ignore my advice: The boss man will look at everyone else's workloads and try to find someone who is overworked and then offload some of their assignments onto you. This person is now vested in your success because they already have invested to some extent their own time and energy in the project that you are being given. So they will likely be a bit of a micromanager on how well you handle everything and carry out your assignments. You do not need this. What is even worse is when your own responsibilities that were idle at the time kick back up, and you are left doing someone else's work that the boss man assigned, while also trying to make sure the assignments you had previously on the job do not get neglected either. It is really a no-win situation.

I unwillingly fell into this situation once, when sources unbeknownst to me filled in the boss man that I did not have much of a workload. My coworker Tess was loaded to the gills, but she was also a “Debbie” in her approach to work. I was not very giddy about wanting to help her out, but I got assigned some of her work nonetheless. I kid you not, she would call me in the double digits each day asking for a status update. I took the following approaches with her:

• Drive her nuts by acting like I was oblivious to what she was wanting me to do.
  
• Pick up the phone when she called and immediately hang it up loudly enough she could hear the clicking noise definitively and know that it was intentional.
  

Or my personal favorite:

• Answer all her questions nicely and professionally, but constantly talking to her with the phone receiver cord being unplugged and plugged in over and over again, so she only catches about every fifth word in our conversation.
  

Ultimately, this level five clinger who obsessively called me practically every hour on the hour grew so frustrated that she took back the work on her own. I am not saying that is the course of action you want to take. I was on my way out. I knew I did not have much time before I would be giving my resignation, so I took the liberty of going to war with this coworker of mine.

The biggest thing when it comes to taking on other assignments, if you are forced to, is to have an exit plan on how to give it back to the coworker when the other responsibilities that you had start picking back up again; otherwise, you will be forced to kiss your part-time trading opportunities good-bye.

Each coworker is different, and you want to be careful how you deal with them, especially when it interferes with your ability to trade. So keep your cool, and work with them in a way that will not land you in the hot seat.

The best way to deal with coworkers most of the time is with kid gloves and not allowing them to get rattled at you personally so that they have the need to knock you off your seat and into the hot seat with the boss man.

Which brings me to my next chapter . . .

T
he last thing that you can afford to have happen as a trader is to allow your interest in the financial markets to be known among the colleagues that you work with. Being a distraction is bad—in fact, it is possibly catastrophic. That's right, “catastrophic” to your ability to successfully trade. If the boss man catches wind that even though you are successfully doing your job, you are also indulging yourself in part-time trading, then your trading will be done for. That is, unless he uses logic and reason in his thinking; then he might turn a blind eye since you get your work done and do a good job at it in the process.

However, if you suck at your job, forget about it! And if that is the case, you should not be reading this book in the first place. Instead, you should try to gain some respect for yourself in the workplace, not pick up an additional habit that will give boss man a reason to kick you to the curb. If you are not performing at the level you should be at your job, you can rest assured that the boss man is looking for any reason to lighten the company of the burden you have become to it.

Here's the big reason for your keeping your trading under wraps: Once the boss man realizes you have time to support a part-time trading endeavor, no matter how limited the time is dedicated to the craft, you are at risk of his assuming that you do not have enough work to do. Instead of using rational thinking and cutting you some slack by letting you continue trading as long as you maintain your job responsibilities, he is just going to throw more work on your plate.

In reality, that is one of the more stupid things most of your Edwards, Debbies, and Garys will do. As a manager, you risk threatening a delicate balance. When you have a solid contributor on your team, you do not give him more work just because you think there may be 20 minutes of unused time in his day. No way. If the person is not a problem, you leave him alone. It is like the old saying, “If it's not broken, do not fix it”; the same is true with employees: if an individual is doing some trading on the side while meeting or exceeding expectations on the job, do not go messing with his workload. In doing so, you will only create for yourself a disgruntled employee.

When I was working in the cube farm, there was a man working a few stalls to my left. He was not a part-time trader, but he apparently had a penchant for cooking and selling beef jerky. You could hear him throughout the day calling his wife to remind her that she needed to take one batch out of the oven and put another one in. Later in the day, you could hear him talking with people interested in buying his jerky or cold-calling various stores to carry his line. Let's just say everyone knew him and what he was doing. It was not an issue really, until he screwed up with an assignment on his real job.

It was not even that big a deal in terms of what he did wrong, but when you screw up, everyone is looking to cover themselves to make sure the blame does not fall on them. So guess who becomes the easy target? That's right, the guy running the beef jerky business—“Maybe if he wasn't more concerned about double checking the beef jerky temperature he was cooking it at, we would not have forgotten to invoice the customer!” That is a hard one to refute when it is said, and when it comes to his coworkers making sure they come out of the hiccup unscathed and look better in the process despite the problem at hand, you can forget about people not using every piece of leverage they have and putting it on the easiest target and making them the scapegoat in order to save themselves from harm.

People will talk and, far worse, people will embellish what they do not know or understand. When you are a part-time trader on the side, your coworkers assume that you are a full-time hedge fund manager who is running a Ponzi scheme at work with company pension funds. That might be extreme, but what I want you to realize, fair or not, is that people will talk about everything they think you might be doing on the job. The details that are fuzzy will just be filled in with whatever makes the gossip that they share the juiciest.

I worked in a lot of different areas and I had the benefit of not having to work with one set of people for too long. One thing that I tried to do, and it may or may not serve you well in your job, is unplug my network cable at night, particularly if I was not going to shut down my computer. The network cable looks like a phone cord, and serves as the connection between your computer and the company's servers.

Most companies will back up their files at night after everyone has gone home. Often, this consumes server resources that they do not want to use when everyone is going to be accessing or on the network (i.e., peak office hours). If you have a coworker that complains about you, they will look at backup files of your computer to see what was on there the day before and to determine whether there is something that is worth taking action on. Personally, I would avoid storing anything on the hard drive that would be related to trading, and most certainly would never store anything on the company's network. But if you are going to put some stuff on the hard drive anyway, you may just want to unplug your network cable prior to leaving each night.

That is far from a foolproof solution, particularly since there is technology out there now, such as the keystroke software, and others where programs on the network will actually take periodic print-screen snapshots of exactly what is on your monitor (it can be every 30 minutes and sometimes as aggressive as every 5 seconds) as it essentially looks through your vantage point in real time. Many times, this software will not get turned on until Human Resources or the boss man has reason to because the amount of storage it would require (even in a small company) would carry a lot of expenses in doing so.

That is why it is so important to remain off the radar because once there is a complaint or a suspicion about your work ethic or that you may be a part-time trader, you are going to be facing some problems, even if it is not warranted. This is also the reason why I did everything I could to be liked by my colleagues—not because I'm a people-pleaser or need to be everyone's friend, but I knew that not making that effort to do so creates the possibility of having enemies at work, and in all honesty, that is the last thing I really wanted for reasons already stated.

Always act like an idiot when it comes to the stock market. If someone is talking about stocks, the direction the market is going in, or simply something that is about to bait you into the conversation, do not fall for it. That is the beginning of a slippery slope that will lead you to trying to validate your opinion with your own credentials as one who has a heavy involvement in the financial markets. When asked about the market, I would play dumb by saying, “I was always told it was best to buy low and sell high.” That way, I did not have to make some comment that made it look like I was from another planet, but also deflecting the conversation by stating one of the most overused trading expressions without giving myself away as so much more than some casual market observer.

If worse comes to worst, and the boss man calls you into his office about negative feedback from your coworkers but you know you are doing a good job and not letting others know about your trading, then there should not be any conversations about trading. Be careful, though, about being defensive with the boss. If you know you are in the right, and have the political capital at work to get away with it, then you should be fine.

As a part-time trader aspiring for the full-time life, you are trying to protect the opportunity at a future way of life. Scoring points at work is not what you need to be seeking. Ruffling the feathers of others can only spell trouble for you down the road when someone decides to get back at you for the smallest of slip-ups. The one thing you do not want to have happen is for your trading and the ability to do it successfully to become compromised and ultimately done away with.

I had one such run-in once with a woman we will call Debbie Douchay. This was my one moment in Corporate America that taught me to hate everything about working in a competitively charged working environment, where they promote the dog-eat-dog mentality in a far-too-aggressive manner. Do not get me wrong, I am capitalist as it gets; otherwise, I would be writing this book for free (which obviously I am not doing), and of all things I would not have my greatest passion in the smallest of details that makes Wall Street tick.

The events that transpired put me over the edge. I doubled down on my commitment to becoming the full-time trader and succeeding as the part-time trader in the process. Essentially, the boss man that I was working for was one of those eight bosses that I tried not to purposefully upset. She was so wicked that she made Somalian pirates look like Boy Scout troop leaders.

Apart from being unethical to the core and consistently asking me to fudge numbers and break company policy that would lead to my immediate dismissal, she also thought that I was somehow her secretary that would go fetch her coffee and run her personal errands. That just was not going to jive well for me. We were on a business trip, and I remember in front of customers and coworkers alike Douchay criticized my note-taking at the meeting simply because she could not understand my personal notes, even though I would later transcribe and print them out as meeting minutes for others to read. When negotiating price with a long-time customer of ours, she negotiated a deal that ruined a decade-old relationship with one of our best customers. This was unprecedented, and when I raised an objection to the long-standing agreement she was forcing both sides to work outside of, she ferociously objected to what I had to say, and despite my being the only person who could commit the corporation to an agreement, she went over my head and negotiated without my being present.

When we got back to the home base, I was confronted with the demand to take part in additional behavior that was also wrong. I refused to do so. As a result, she took action against me, complaining to the boss man's boss man that she wanted me kicked off the job. Because she was poker buddies with this person, her wish was granted. The grim reality of being reassigned to a different project due to “behavior that was detrimental to the team” made it to where any possibility of a pay raise or promotion the following year was impossible.

I provided all the evidence and e-mails showing how Douchay was exercising a personal vendetta against me. Even her personal and unethical behavior was brought to light. I was told that while I was right in what I did, Douchay was wrong, and I had no business being kicked off the program, but they refused to take action because I was too low on the totem pole, and Douchay's poker buddy had far too much power to risk their own credibility for my sake. So I became the sacrificial lamb.

At the end of the day, Douchay survived and continued to do what she was doing and wrecking other careers to cover up her own shortcomings. While none of what I have written here has much to do with trading on the surface, there are some important lessons that you can learn at my expense.

Soon thereafter, a number of individuals wanted me to sign a petition involving nearly 90 percent of the people working under Douchay and submit it to Human Resources for her unethical behavior. Personally, I would have loved to do it, but that was not my objective in my place of employment. My objective was to remain employed and perform my job at an acceptable level, while growing my part-time trading endeavor into an eventual full-time position one day.

Getting caught up with Human Resources could lead to far greater problems that were not in my “strategic guide plan” for eventually ditching this place one day. As a result, I declined to take action and let them find someone else to lead the charge. Unfortunately, nobody else wanted to take the reins either, and Douchay got away with everything that she had done.

As I've mentioned time and time again, my objective was to stay below the corporate radar. I did not want to be “known.” In fact, the fewer people that knew my name, the better. If I took Douchay to Human Resources, who knows, it could have turned on me, and I might have eventually been the one on the hot seat for reasons beyond my control. As a result, I declined to retribution, despite badly wanting it. The one radar you definitely want to avoid being on at all costs is Human Resources'. They have the tools and means to do what they want, and the fewer number of people in that organization that knew my name, the better it was for my future aspirations.

That common saying of “stay the course” could not have rung more true in this situation. Revenge was the natural reaction for me to rectify a wrong that had been done. I wanted justice, and I wanted to clear my name and make sure somebody paid for trying to throw me under the bus in the process. However, looking back years later, would I be where I am at today, free from the responsibilities of Corporate America and instead doing what I love most? Perhaps not.

Leading a coup d'etat against Douchay could have hampered my ability to trade as a part-timer and ultimately (particularly if she could have turned the tables on me yet again) led to my dismissal or spending a longer time on the job than what I had originally expected. When you start taking those corporate actions against another employee who has some sway and pull, you never know for sure what the outcome is going to be, and sometimes that outcome can come with devastating consequences. When that happens, Douchay would just win again, and at the expense of my being able to trade part-time.