I Fought ACME9 and ACME9 Won: Part 7 Fixing What Isn’t Broken

The next two months were like an ill wind blowing off of Lake Michigan. I had a couple of trades go sour and the big losses in those two names put me into a huge hole, and it took a huge effort from me to break even during the period.

As my luck would have it, those two months led into our-mid year reviews and the rest of Brown’s group did really well during that period. Things were about to get ugly.

During my review, Brown summarized my last couple of months pointing out that I had hit a couple of road blocks, but had dug my way out of the holes that they had put me in.

He then asked me what my hopes were for my future at ACME9. “What do you want to do here?”

My answer was something along the lines of “How about treating me like you treat just about every other trader at the firm?”

I suggested that I’d really enjoy working for Mr. Blonde, who I felt fit my temperament better and seemed to respect my abilities more than Brown. Brown shrugged this off positing that Blonde and I were too much alike, too stressed about our profits and would wind up killing each other.

Brown told me that he didn’t think I was good enough to trade a bigger account because I didn’t use the firms’ precious tools enough. I was still well ahead of the goals that had been set for me earlier in the year, but two tough months and suddenly the world was coming to an end.

To me this was a bunch of nonsense. My only problem was that Brown treated my like a novice when I was a professional. I wasn’t using the tools as much as the others because they had capped me at one sixth of their capital. I was doing the job they gave me really well, they just hadn’t given me much of a job to do, at least not one where you could earn much in the way of effort points.

Brown was a huge baseball fan and as far as I was concerned, I was an All-Star first baseman and he was treating me like a pinch hitter, and if you treat an All-Star like a scrub, it’s going to put him off of his game.

Brown wasn’t buying the baseball analogy. Instead Brown wanted to try to reshape me into more of an ACME9 type of guy.

The first thing he wanted me to do was keep a written diary of what tools I used and how long I used them, which I found to be pretty close to the equivalent of treating me like a six year old. It was true that ACME9 has great tools, but a lot of them were really redundant especially given my level of experience. It was such an absurd request that I didn’t really take it that seriously. I wasn’t missing any trades. I was as prepared and knowledgeable about my issues as anyone else was, I was just stuck with an arbitrary ceiling over my head that kept me from looking as busy as everybody else.

The next two months were like hell on earth. Brown was constantly peering over to see what I was doing. He was making me crazy, and I started making unnecessary trades just to make Brown think that I was working harder.

In a number of occasions he was making me so nuts that I was rapidly turning winning positions into losers. I was giving away a ton of money just trying to convince him that I was working hard. It had become a nightmare.

My only moments of sanity during this period came twice a week when I got to teach a class for two hours during the trading day. ACME9 has begun hiring a bunch of kids out of college, and despite my middling reputation as a trader they were impressed enough with my knowledge of the fundamentals that they asked me to teach their trading class.

Teaching is actually one of my strong points and I did a really good job with the class and garnered some praise firm wide for my efforts. To a certain extent there were positive aspects to the new hires. Having a bunch of new inexperienced people around meant that I was no longer on the bottom of the ladder, but there were still aspects that bothered me. ACME9 was obsessed with expansion, and I’d seen a similar wave at my previous firm O’Connor and Associates. Firms start hiring every person they can get their hands on during the good times. They’re making tons of money and it never occurs to them that their earning could possibly slow down. Eventually, they either saturate the market place increasing internal competition or they hit an unexpected rough patch. In either case, they take a look around and see too many bodies and someone has to go.

All these fresh out of college kids that I was teaching, were making a minimal amount of money, weren’t spoiled by years of over the top income, and were much more willing than me to stick around the office well into dinner time. They were clueless, they had plenty to do. I knew what I was doing, I wanted to go home.

My one year anniversary with the firm rolled around and it was time for another firm trip. Although I had been the hit of the New Orleans trip, my daily battles with Brown left me less than excited about a weekend full of team building exercises at a hunting lodge in Wisconsin. Instead I explained that I had to stay home and administer diabetes shots to my cat.

Apparently, this year’s trip was run by a bunch of ex Air Force guys, and the entire firm came back with lots of debriefing exercises to improve their trading abilities. I had no idea what they were talking about, but it became pretty clear after awhile that none of them did either.

Another byproduct of the Wisconsin trip was the hiring of one of the Air Force guys as director of strategic operations. The new hire demanded that everyone call him Whiz, I never did find out what his real name was or for that matter what he was supposed to be doing there. I chuckled to a few of my friends that his real job description was executive overhead.

One of the first things Whiz did at ACME9 was to send out an email that explained that the 2006 firm trip was so successful that it would take a full two years to plan the next one. What? The 2006 trip was so magnificently successful that he was canceling the 2007 trip, what kind of Kafkaesque language was that?

At about this time, my best friend at ACME9 left for Morgan Stanley in New York. The whole firm was busy debriefing, and I was bracing for the inevitable showdown with Brown.

I Fought ACME9 and ACME9 Won: Part 8 Me and Brown Nose to Nose