The Great AdapterQ: What were you thinking throughout that time? Every day
you would come back home, you’d be beaten up, what was going
through your mind?
A: Horrible. I’d come up here [Chicago], and I was losing a lot
of money. I could have been back home earning money, growing
my other business, and know what I was doing. It just didn’t make
sense. So I said, I’m going to draw the line in the sand, if it gets to
this point, I’m just done.
Q: So what was your time stop? Was it six months?
A: Well I think I started in August, so I was going into the end of
the year and I figured somewhere through the holidays and maybe
an extra month beyond that would be my max if it continued the
way it was going.
Q: What made you keep on going?
A: I got lucky [laughter], extremely lucky. I started building a
little portfolio of these tiny biotech stocks—$3to$5stocks—a
few thousand shares of each. You could hold stuff like that,
and I was getting margin calls here and there. But there was
a service that met your margins calls forx amount of dollars
[laughter].
Q: This sounds like the traders book of whatnotto do.
A: Oh yeah, to the T. I mean, I could have written that book.
So yes, I got lucky. Things really started booming, late ’99, early
2000 before the bubble burst in the spring. Suddenly these teeny
little things started running I was jumping on these trades and just
holding them instead of getting in and out of them.