I Fought ACME9 and ACME9 Won: Part 5: I’m on an Island

The next five months or so were pretty good for me at ACME9. When you’re a relative equal among traders and things are going well it’s a pretty fun job. There was lots of jokes and small gambling on just about anything you could think up. Wanna bet 5 dollars who can throw their credit card closest to the wall? I bet you ten bucks no one in the research department has ever heard of Burning Man. There was a miniature basketball hoop. I once bet a dollar against myself that I couldn’t touch its rim, and lost, which again assured people that I was a really honest guy. Usually, we even had a short poker tournament at the end of work on Fridays.

Eventually we changed offices.

Our firm now had a huge office in the Board of Trade. In the meantime, I make another completely insane error.

Every once in a while someone sends out a joking firm wide email. The firm wide email is a sucker bet. If it’s universally found to be funny, people respond and tell you that you are funny. If it’s not extremely funny though, your reputation is on the line. There’s really no upside, which is why my new work best friend Jules and I are addicted to them. We’re the wits at the firm.

It makes the people without power love us and makes the people with power wonder about us. The firm would routinely find us wandering around together giggling like little school girls. Mrs. Marsellus Wallace once called him ACME9’s cruise director. At the company Christmas party, I told Jules that I would be willing to marry him if he weren’t … black.

At this point I probably should have realized that my buddy Jules, who was straight out of MIT and considered himself a really good looking rocket scientist, had less job security issues to worry about than me. Naively, though, I was really starting to like the place and hoped that eventually people would regard me as being as competent as I was eccentric.

You can get away with this as long as you are profitable. If you aren’t profitable then you are the first to go, but by this point I already figured that if I didn’t make money right away I was doomed.

The guy in charge of our office move is a nice guy who no one respects. He is widely known as not the sharpest tool in the shed and was fired almost immediately after the move was completed.

Leading up to the move he sends out like 1,000 E-mails all with the subject heading “Moving Thoughts.” After about the 700th of these missives, easily two thirds of which were completely banal and worthless. I sent everyone in the firm like 50 of Jack Handy’s “Deep Thoughts” from Saturday Night Live.

This would have been fine had there not been profanity in a few of them. I soon receive an email from Marcellus, the owner about appropriate e-mails.

Again my bad, I never even looked at them – I just assumed that if they were on TV that they wouldn’t be profane, but these were apparently from the unexpurgated version. I have zero common sense, but I am amusing.

A few years earlier, I had applied for a trading job in Los Angeles and a really motivated type of guy called me up and hassled me about my answering machine message which said, “Hi, Welcome to Brad’s House of Wax.” It was just something meaningless and silly that I put on there. He proceeded to hassle me about the message.

“Why would you have an answering machine message like that while you are looking for a job in a serious industry,” he asked. My answer was that basically I didn’t ever really want to work for someone who would be irritated by such a message. He wasn’t impressed by my gusto. 

After about two months in the new building, the firm decided that they didn’t like how they had integrated the new traders into their system. A lot of trades in our accounts come from customer shows that are traded by senior traders and put into our accounts sort of like gifts from above, and as a result they can’t really assess how well or badly we are doing.

They are taking away our 13 million dollar accounts and giving each of us 1 million dollars to do with whatever we want as long as it is within reason.

Each of us that is, except Spivey, who for some reason they thought was a genius. I didn’t get the genius part and this guy became more and more annoying every single day. No matter what the subject, this guy was an expert on it.

One day he opined that he liked dogs but hated cats, and I was so annoyed that I facetiously called him a Nazi. He pretty much knew how I felt about him, and as far as peers went, he was pretty much the only one I didn’t get along famously with. Occasionally, Spivey would come over and talk to the guy sitting next to me, and afterwards I’d have to have a talk with my neighbor about the company he was keeping.

After two months with our million dollar accounts four of us were up about $250,000, and a couple other guys had about broken even. I had been the highest earner during most of the period, but I had a stock pre-announce bad earnings and fall like 30% that cost me like $100,000, which is part of the business.

The six of us had become a bizarre sort of sideshow. Every week the whole firm got to see reports on our progress even the people who had nothing to do with trading like the technology groups. We were like a huge experiment they could gamble on. I thought that my performance had finally proven my trading skills, but apparently I was wrong.

They took the other three traders and put them back on the 13 million dollar accounts. I despite making pretty close to the exact same amount of money, well, they gave me another million dollars.

The rational for this was that while I had done just as well as they had, the others had continued to trade the ACME9 way, while I had experimented a bit.

This was a huge mistake. When they said you can do anything you want, what they really meant was this is a test to see if you’ve been indoctrinated into our system.

I hadn’t really traded that much differently from the others, but apparently just enough that I was considered something akin to a communist.

Nevertheless, even though I’d returned 25% on their money in two months, I had totally failed their little test and it wound up dooming me. I was the guy who made money the wrong way. I tried to conform more and more after that, but that would remain their attitude towards me. He’s the guy with an opinion; the guy that doesn’t take full advantage of our fabulous tools. Every once in a while someone important would say that having a different trading style diversified the firm and helped the diversification of its portfolio, but no one really acted like they appreciated it.

For the next 8 months, I was essentially 1/6th of an employee. I was sort of in a group, but I wasn’t really consulted on anything. For most of this time, the only other person in this boat with me was the guy who didn’t make any money.

This was incredibly difficult on me.

1. It isolated me again from the rest of the firm
2. The only other guy in my boat was a clear washout

One of the reasons that it’s advantageous to work for a firm is that it increases diversification. We are basically gambling for a living. Just taking offers and hitting bids means that you have to be pretty good just to break even. Breaking even means that you are at least profitable enough to cover the vigorish, which isn’t insignificant.

The theory is that if you have twenty good traders that in all likelihood 15 will make money, and a few will break even or lose a little bit. Losing money shouldn’t be a crime in this business. No matter what anyone tells you, there is an awful lot of luck involved.

Unfortunately, I was no longer part of a team. I was on my own. I still had to act like I was part of a team of course, but I was on my own. Pretty soon my relationship with Mr. Brown started to go downhill fast

I Fought ACME9 and ACME9 Won: Part 6 Between a Rock and a Hard On