The road less travelled

I was given the worst possible advice by our best options trader a few days ago. Suffice to say, he is brilliant in his own way, soft-spoken with a keen attention to detail in his exquisite scalping strategies in which he makes over 1000 trades per day.

This talented scalper, let's call him Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, after the basketball star; Kareem said to me that to be a great trader one had to fail and lose a lot of money. That is, to feel that pain of the loss of capital, to understand that agony in which one couldn't sleep at night because one was drowning in negative capital.

I didn't need to feel that agony. For the last half decade, I witnessed the decline of my family's fortune, as their multi-million dollar investments turned into dust. I stood witness, while my parents dutifully shielded me from that loss of capital. The future looked bleak, but my family never lost their perserverance. It's something that I never discussed, this economic tragedy that had befallen the members of my family, who for decades had enjoyed the American Dream.

It made me realise that women are often shielded from fiduciary matters. We are absent when business is discussed. As children, we learn that is it vulgar to discuss money with others; and we are sent on our way, to primp and preen, and be admired for our beauty and diligence, but are never consulted when important decisions are made regarding our financial future.

Middle class families send their daughters to become accountants and lawyers, in the hopes that they will never suffer the fate of an unknown financial future. I studied music and art, and in the United States, that is a privilege as I have come to learn. I look at all my artist friends, and most of them ahead of their time, the Picassos, Klimts and Van Goghs of their time, except no one knew who they were yet. Yes, we were all struggling.

So my brilliant co-worker, the star options trader continues to tell me that my non financial background could be a great asset; after all, my mind wasn't filled with superfluous information, and my particular style of visual thinking lead to an eerie accuracy in creating charts that always met their targets. But perhaps, underneath it all, I always had a love affair with the world's economy.

For me, failure wasn't an option.