Happy Anniversary to me!

Yesterday was my kid's second birthday, it was as well the 24+9=33-month anniversary of my decision to dedicate my time to learn the art of Speculation and to strongly commit to quit asap the Orc Race I'd been running at the Front-Office of Investment Banks for more than a decade. The moment I realized I would be a dad for the first time (and I've to confess a bad bonus that year, keep in mind it was end of 2007..., helped) was a total eye-opener to me at least on two points :

- What I'd wanted to do is to trade, and as weird as it could sound, that's not as a professional trader with an investment bank that I could trade... I've known hundreds of professional traders, and I can tell you that 99% of them (including myself) joined the race in order to speculate (I don't know maybe because of the gambling aspect...), most of them (that still includes me) believed that professional trading was related to a large extent to speculation... Big mistake! Your job as a bank trader is to buy cheap and sell dearer with a minimum risk (bank traders have strong directional limits) and this in a more or less straight way : I mean when you work with more complex and structured products, the only difference is you have mathematical models that tell you what is cheap and what is dear, and your job is to manage your book in order to make sure that what you sold will ultimately be dearer than what you bought, that's the so called delta hedging, the old good Black-Scholes. I spent years to understand this and the fact I started in a prop trading desk for sure didn't help. Once again : bank traders don't "trade"

- Working with an Investment Bank won't make me rich (as a reminder I use Felix Dennis' definition of rich : the first level of riches, the lesser rich, starts at £15m). I know a few guys who managed to become "comfortable poors" and got a few million quids in their early 30s working with an IB, but the competition is extremely hard there and these guys had to be highly competent, work damn hard, "kill" tens of guys from Harvard with a 180-IQ who had done everything to work with IB since they're teenagers (basically the basic bank grunt) and most of all those guys had to be very very very lucky. I don't say that making money from speculation is easier, some days I realize my plan just expects to beat Soros' performance (I'll discuss this in a later post), but I say that I think that speculation fits me better : there's no waste of energy in political wars and no waste of time working for someone else that will be paid for your work
33 months, almost 3 years spent monitoring daily the markets and making hundreds of trades, and I still consider myself as an apprentice speculator but fortunately I've learnt a lot and improved on my way to become a Lord of Trading. The path is still long, so for now, happy birthday to my kid and happy anniversary to me!
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FYI As this post is published: SPX 1090 // SX5E 2721 // NKY 9240 // DAX : 6171 // EURUSD 1.2881 // USDJPY 85.27 // XAUUSD : 1221