The 100-Pip Tradermy grades seriously reflected that lack of interest. So I took a job
where I could get one, and the place I could get a job was as a
lowly staff-assistant-type position at Montgomery Securities in San
Francisco and I absolutely loved the environment. I was actually
working at Montgomery Securities on the day they helped take
Netscape public. Everybody in the office, especially in the oper-
ations department, was fascinated by the idea that this company
with no revenues could be taken public. I remember people telling
me that this new company was doomed to failure and there was no
way it could ever survive. Well, we know now that the founders of
the company were made very rich and that the company was sold
to AOL in 1998 for$4 billion. The day Netscape went public, we
watched as the stock kept going up and everybody made predic-
tions as to how far back down it would go. But it really never did
go down for as long as I was there. And I think that was one of my
formative experiences, where I realized that the markets were an
amazing vehicle for wealth creation and they made people wealthy
very quickly. Maybe that’s not a great lesson, but it certainly was
one of the things that attracted me to the markets once again. And
I never lost interest for longer than a day after that.
Q: Did you ever finish your law degree or did you switch careers
before that?
A: I did finish law school. I could honestly say that there are
very few regrets in my life, but one of those would be that I did
not take a job as a trading assistant at Montgomery Securities but
rather continued my legal studies and went all the way through
and finished law school.
Q: When did you decide to switch careers?
A: Once again my not-so-fantastic grades in law school threw me
an opportunity to look elsewhere. I had job offers after law school
to work in law firms, and what I realized at that point was that it