Millionaire Tradersto trade shares, options, and also let me buy options on futures. I
traded a little bit of that and by then I learned a little bit more. I was
also much more defensive. I think I might have made maybe$ 300
on it over a 6- to 12-month period. After that I graduated from
school and wound up getting a job on the floor at the commodity
exchange as an order clerk—which is pretty much how everybody
starts out. I’ll never forget that story. It was the summer of 1988
and I had two jobs offers. One was from Citibank as a Forex trader
and the other was as a clerk on the commodity exchange. At the
time, the Forex job was offering$24,000 a year and the clerk was
$16,000. Back then 24K was a good starting salary for someone out
of college. For someone earning 16K, it was pathetic if they had
a college degree. I remember coming home that evening and my
mom said, “Well, how did it go today?” I said, “Pretty good. I got
two job offers and I picked one.” She goes, “Oh, okay. Well, when
do you start at Citibank?” I said, “No, I’m starting on the floor
next week. Then she asked: “Did you learn anything at school, one
job for$24,000 another one for$16,000—come on, the choice is
obvious.” Then she asked why we were paying all this money for
school [laughter].
Q: When you were on the floor as a clerk, could you trade for
yourself or was it forbidden?
A: It was forbidden. You had to do your job, and my job was
to take orders from customers. It would have been a conflict of
interest if I had positions on as I was trying to service the clients.
My primary responsibility was to take their orders, cancel their
orders, report their fills, and not be trading my own accounts or
anything like that. I got really lucky, you know the stock market
crashed in 1987 and there was a pretty much a recession on Wall
Street from 1988 to 1989—people were not hiring aggressively. I
got lucky in that I got offered a job by someone I didn’t know on the
floor. What I found out about the floor was that there’s two kinds
of people down there and I hate to say it, but this is what I saw.
There were really nice, good people who are losers in the markets,