Trading Day 4

The Big Wait

They say there are two moments when a trader dies. The first is when their fund shuts down. The second is… well, you know.

Perhaps it’s a short squeeze you didn’t see coming. Or someone shows up fresher, quicker, better at what you do best. Worst case, maybe you bled out over time and people just knew you didn’t have “it” anymore.

How do you hang it up? How do you return the capital to investors?

“Sorry, your AUM is better off building another man’s penthouse.”

John sighed and checked his watch, a nifty little Blancpain Chronographe Flyback.

All he had was time nowadays. No time to watch the markets - too painful. He paced back and forth relentlessly, checking messages, reading emails, taking naps. Lots of naps. Anything to pass the time.

There was always the bottle, which he occasionally dabbled with, though publicly he claimed he gave that life up. He knew all too well that boredom punished the alcoholic twice as hard.

The alternate use of time that his contemporaries all seemed to thrive at on a surface level was doing anything it took to make sure that the first descriptor on their Wikipedia page was “philanthropist” rather than “former hedge fund manager”. However, this inevitably resulted in a delusion of being able to relate to the common man when none of them had thought in m’s in years, let alone k’s, and ended with deranged, reputation-destroying political campaigns. The jokes practically wrote themselves, in his case.

“Just another misapplication of capital from John”.

“One-hit wonder strikes out again.”

Though being right once had made his career, it had only bought him 8 years, which, admittedly, was 60% better than the usual five you got where everyone would listen to anything you said after a major winning bet. By now, people scarcely took his cocktail recipes, let alone his takes on gold and bitcoin. The hands on his watch formed yet another late night right angle as it ticked away into a new day. Well, one drink wouldn’t hurt.

He poured himself a seasonal concoction of his own creation, an eggnog, bourbon, and cinnamon amalgamation with a melted Werther’s original at the bottom of the glass, and riffled through some charity flyers, wondering what philanthropic cause he could champion next. However, as with asset classes, philanthropic causes had become crowded as well. Nobody could make a name for themselves in any donation category without fucking Bloomberg turning his eye on it, save for Toy Guns for Tots.

Another sigh, another sip.

He simply couldn’t understand what he had done wrong. No matter what analysis he did - valuation, sentiment, intuitive, incoherent drunken rambling - everything indicated that a bubble of market-ending proportions had constructed itself. And yet, everything kept going up and to the right. The media had called him so many names that what was once a reference to Chicken Little was now a Netflix direct-to-TV scare media reference. Then came the redemptions, all because he had picked the wrong “not-an-inflation-hedge” over some dumb internet money fad. For a man who had made one of the greatest calls of all time, it was a cruel twist of fate that he couldn’t hit when everything was going up. “Negative Beta John”, they called him, a cruel reference of his realized ability to inverse the markets. Redemption had come for his fund, but when would it come for him?