The Treasure Hunteris exciting and he didn’t mind that I was over there so I traded for
a few days there, scalped, made some money, but it was really this
guy’s turf and I didn’t want to step on his toes. So I went back to
sleep in the sugar pit. Near the end of the year, I thought to myself,
after this year, you have enough money to buy a seat on the cotton
exchange for yourself and you have some money left over to put
in your account. That place is going to be cooking for six months
afterwards, I mean, they just dropped a bomb over there and re-
verberations are going to go for at least six months till that thing
dies. Why don’t you take a shot on your own. Instead of making
20 percent of what you make, make a hundred. So that’s what I did.
So near the end of that year I told my firm that I was going to be
leaving them and that I would trade the last month of December
as hard as I could for them, which I did. I told them that they really
should have me in orange juice because sugar stinks. That place
was still gyrating every day, and they said, okay, you can go over
there since the other guy didn’t mind. What was great about that,
too, is that I was still trading for this company, but I was learning
things about orange juice and was also making friends with some of
the other brokers over there. This way, I wasn’t some new strange
face who showed up on January 1st, 1992.
Q: So you could cash in on order flow when order flow came to
you?
A: Yes, and I had more ammo because I was still trading for the
company backed by millions, whereas in a few months, I was going
to be just me with my little$25,000 in my account. So, in 1992,
January 1, I went on my own, started trading orange juice on the
cotton exchange, and I had a net worth of$25,000 and the clearing
firms were so afraid of me, I could tell every day, every morning
that they just had this look like, “Now listen idiot, if we lose$1,000
because you lose$26,000, we will hunt you down.” [Laughter.]
They watched me like a hawk. If an option went too far in the
money, they forced me to exercise it no matter what. They were
nervous about me. It eventually ended because that year I actually
turned that$25,000 into over$250,000 trading on the floor.