Once a Trader, Always a Trader

I had my own way of speaking when I was a trader. I used to say things like:

·      Bullshit

·      Fuck that shit

·      Fuck you

·      Get the fuck out of here

·      Blow me

If you were on the trading floor and watching me from a distance, you would have had a difficult time telling if I was a trader or had Tourette’s.

The bad language served a purpose. On any given day, I was handling a couple hundred trades, and with each one of them, I had to make a decision. I had to immediately judge whether it was good or bad, profitable or unprofitable. I had to make this decision in less than a second. Therefore, traders should be decisive. You will occasionally made bad decisions, but you live with the consequences of the bad decisions and move on.

Some people are good at making decisions, and others aren’t. Myers-Briggs has a less good reputation these days, but I still find it to be useful. It takes all kinds of personality types to be a trader, as long as they are the -TJ subtype. T stands for thinking, and J stands for judging. I call this the Fuck That Shit subtype—these are people who can look at a situation and immediately judge whether it is favorable or not. I happen to be an INTJ, the personality type that is known as the “architect” or “mastermind.”  But since I have the Fuck That Shit subtype, I was ideally suited to being a trader. If you were to administer a personality test to the denizens of a trading floor, I would guess that over 80 percent of them had the -TJ subtype.

But that behavior spreads into other areas of your life as well. You might find yourself hanging out with your wife’s friends, who are all the -FP subtype, and acting like a gorilla. All of this has been written about before, in Liar’s Poker, Street Freak, and elsewhere. Trading has its own subculture that would be considered to be inappropriate behavior elsewhere in the world.

I am still a trader to this day. And I can spot an opportunity within seconds. Many of you know that I am building a house here in South Carolina. A year ago, my wife comes into the living room, holding her laptop. On the screen was a Zillow listing for a piece of land. The second I saw it, I knew I was going to buy it and build my dream home there. It turned out to be an amazing investment. I didn’t agonize over the decision for weeks. I made up my mind instantaneously, and pulled the trigger.

If you have a leader, you want him to be decisive. But you also want him to be accountable. Trump was decisive, but not accountable. DeSantis is decisive—we’ll see if he is accountable. Biden is neither decisive nor accountable. If you’re in a position of responsibility, you must have the ability to make decisions quickly, and live with the consequences—not shift blame to someone else.

As a trader, you have to be competitive—you have to be addicted to winning. And working on a sell-side trading desk, there is a lot of losing. You’re trading against people who plot and scheme to steal money from you. You’re getting bombs dropped on you all day long. Everyone is a thief, or a scumbag. I have always been hyper-competitive and obsessed with winning. Parenting philosophies differ on this, but when I was a kid, my dad would never let me win—at anything. I actually agree with this, because when you do win, it actually means something. I remember being 0-142 in chess with my dad, but when I finally won, it was a huge celebration. And I never gave up.

As a trader you must also have a very short memory—the memory of a goldfish. You fuck something up, you clean up the mess, and move onto the next trade. There is always another trade. This is something they teach professional athletes. Forget about the last pitch. Forget about the last at-bat. Forget about the last shot, no matter what the outcome. If you’ve struck out 54 times in a row, none of it matters. It was said that Derek Jeter was the best at doing this—he did not dwell in the past. He had absolutely no memory, and was out there hacking at his next time up at the plate.

This is one reason that Wall Street banks really like to hire collegiate or professional athletes as traders. Yes, they are good at performing under pressure, but the mental makeup that is needed for sports is also needed for trading. We all have slumps. We all have periods of time when things are not going well. It’s about your ability to shake it off, rub some dirt on it, and get back in the game. I’m actually not the best at doing this. The only sport I’ve played competitively in the last 10 years is racquetball. I’m pretty good at it. They have tournaments here in Myrtle Beach. The best I’ve done is to come in third, in the A division. But I start making mistakes, I get down on myself, and I give up. Lucky for me, when it comes to intellectual pursuits, like trading, I have a much better mental makeup.

Speaking of professional athletes, I mentioned in the first issue of WGGTB that we were going to discuss Miguel Cabrera’s enormous hog. You have no idea. He puts John Holmes, John Dillinger, and Dirk Diggler to shame. It’s the size of your forearm. Funny thing about penis size—it’s essentially random—you never know who is going to get a big one, but it is weakly correlated to height. Miguel Cabrera hit the jackpot, he and his giant dong will end up in Cooperstown. Even though it’s random, it seems as though professional athletes are disproportionally in possession of giant dicks. Darryl Strawberry had one, too. And if you have one, you have to use it, right?  You can’t let it go to waste.

A source relayed to me an incident in the locker room where Miguel Cabrera was being interviewed by a female reporter. The interview began with Cabrera standing there, his schlong peacefully coiled in his Calvin Kleins, in all its slumbering glory. The interview ended with his nude eel slithering up the middle of his chest. Needless to say, it was a distraction. Apparently, this was good for a few laughs in the clubhouse. It’s evocative of the Lisa Olson/Zeke Mowatt sexual harassment incident back in the 1980s, when Victor Kiam owned the Patriots. That shit still goes on, I guess. Is it sexual harassment?  For sure. An erection is rather involuntary—I certainly can’t command one into existence, at least, not at this age. Maybe Miggy could, in which case would be a man of many talents.

Go fuck yourself,

Jared

Music Recommendation: Hey come out to my party on April 1st!  It’s at Doux Supper Club, 59 W 21st St, 7pm-12am. Tickets are $25, and you can get them here:

https://www.eventbrite.com/myevent?eid=258942372607

What can I say?  My parties are awesome. Great music, great space, you’ll meet some interesting people, there’s no downside here.

P.S. We’re Gonna Get Those Bastards will always be free. Please forward to as many people as you like.