The Treasure Hunterbut you know they would be your best friends and they would loan
you their last buck to buy lunch if you did a bad gold trade or
something. Then there were a bunch of rich, ruthless jerks. That
was the kind of the delineation between the two types of traders on
that floor—it is a very competitive environment. I got lucky in that
through chance I just happened to get a job with a guy who was
rich, who knew what he was doing in the markets, who was making
money, and was also actually a nice person who cared about your
career, not just how much money he could make off you working
for him. It was just the luckiest thing that happened to me. One
of the reasons I took that job on the floor instead of working with
Citigroup is that he had promised me if I studied the market and
learned it, if I picked it up quickly I would be in the ring trading
within 6 to 12 months.
Q: That’s pretty fast!
A: Yes, really fast, most people take three to five years. So I
jumped at the chance because I wanted to go as quickly as possible
into the trading side, I didn’t want to be answering phones all day.
So this really excited me about the job and I’ll never forget what
happened next. When you’re on the phones, you make friends with
the people next to you. They are your competitors, but you are also
chatting about what you are doing this weekend, what you are doing
with a girlfriend, and this and that. So about three months into my
job, a so-called friend of mine was next to the silver pit with me
and the market was really slow and it was getting time to go home
for the weekend. All of the sudden he looks at me and he’s like,
“Indi, what are you doing down here, you’ve got a college degree”
Q: Did most clerks not have college degree?
A: No, a lot of them didn’t actually. So he said what are you
standing down here getting underpaid, answering telephones for?
When you could be doing something elseupstairs. You know, at
an investment banking firm or a trading firm or something like
that. I said to him, well these guys promised to put me in the ring