Millionaire TradersQ: Now you currently don’t trade in the pit. So how long did you
actually spend trading for the company in a pit?
A: I worked for that company for three years and, at the end
of the third year, I’d saved enough money to buy a seat. I bought
a seat on the cotton exchange because one day I was literally
laying down in the sugar options pit because it was one of those
periods where nothing was going on in the market and this had
been actually going on for a month or two and the market was
just horrible and I’ll never forget what happened next. I was laying
down, literally looking up at the ceiling, and I heard a roar from
one of the quadrants, like a riot had broken out or something. I
ran over there and my company had given me a cotton exchange
seat as well, which I never used. I went over there and there was a
crop report and this was in 1991, I think. There was a crop report
in orange juice and the orange juice market went up 40 percent in
one day and the place was crazy.
Q: Was there some kind of freeze in Brazil or something?
A: It was a crop report that everyone miscalculated. Everyone
expected the crop to increase and, for some reason, the crop ma-
terially decreased because of some citrus aphid or some bug or
something and, of course, the whole ring was short along with the
market going into this report and it was pandemonium. They had
security guards, and if you did not have a cotton exchange badge
you could not go walk through that quadrant. Whether you were
going to the bathroom or going to lunch, you couldn’t go there.
I had the badge. So I went in the middle of the pit and it was
pandemonium, yelling, screaming, insanity. This is what I loved
and I couldn’t help it, but I started reacting to order flow [laugh-
ter]. Then I thought, “Okay, idiot you better go downstairs and
run some options theoretical values before you start shooting your
mouth off in here.” I did and then went back in there and it was
lot of fun. Now the problem was that we already had a prop trader
trading orange juice and I was the sugar guy. But, I thought, this