Millionaire TradersQ: What type of commodities were they trading?
A: Agricultural. They were trading corn. That’s their staple food
product, which they also use for animal feed. Wheat and sunflower
seeds and soybeans also.
Q: So were on you on the floor of the exchange?
A: No, it was electronic and that was bizarre. Here I was—I went
from New York City, the financial capital of the world, the most
sophisticated financial battleground where everything is done by
yelling and screaming and spitting on people and poking them with
pencils and here I go into the third world and it’s all electronically
integrated. It was the weirdest thing.
Q: So that must have been different for you, since what you were
doing mostly was reacting to flow. Electronically it must be very
different from hearing people yelling and screaming. How did that
work?
A: Oh man, it was terrible because you’re right on the floor. I
could hear people yelling and screaming. Hearing the noise level
would get you up. On a computer screen there’s nothing. I remem-
ber times I’d be reading the newspaper and all of a sudden I’ll look
up and I’d see my screen blinking indicating that the market’s limit
down or something and I’d been asleep through about a 30-pip
drop in prices where, as in the old days, if I was on the floor you’d
definitely hear that and you’d react to that. So it was a little bit
different.
Q: Did you have to change the style of your trading then?
A: Yes, I’d have to set up alerts on the computer to make a noise,
and I would use various indicators—oscillators to determine when