The Treasure Hunterany one day, trade, deal, or whatever. And then wait for these
opportunities to come along, because you will find them. If you are
patient, you’ll see a time where you’re in the zone and the markets
are behaving just like your script says it should—now let’s give it
gas and try to build up some equity and then, when it comes back
to the situations where I don’t know what’s going on, things are
getting too uncertain. Then you turn to protecting your capital,
maybe even go to cash and just clear your head. So that’s how I
deal with it, and for me to tell you, oh my goal is to make$ 300
a day, I mean, yeah, that’s nonsense—or if I want to think big
and think positive like Donald Trump and make millions of dollars
a year. That’s just nonsense to me to either way understate or
overstate your goals. I mean maybe 10 years ago I used to do that
and I would tell my dad this year is starting off really slow, I think
I’m going to struggle to make a$100,000 trading on the floor this
year. But I might end up making$700,000 that year. Then there’d
be other years where I think, oh, this year is great, I’m going to
make a killing, I’m going to make probably a million this year and
I end up making$150,000. I just found that it is ridiculous to think
that way.
Q: Your sense of forecasting your own equity is the worst?
A: It’s the worst, it’s horrible. Some people take this stuff seriously
though, which brings me to another war story: Several years ago I
was on the floor of the New York Commodity Exchanges and there
was a prominent trader who used to work for Richard Dennis of
the Turtles fame. I overheard him talking to his clerk about a chart
of his account equity, and he was going on and on about how
perfect the chart was and how this could mean that new highs in
his account equity were just around the corner. Well, I couldn’t
resist, and so I went up to these guys and asked: “Wow what chart
is that because I want to sell the heck out of that market?” He
looked up at me as if he wanted to kill me and then exploded at me
with every curse word you could imagine. I mean this guy really
believed in this stuff.