t mind that he was now interested intrading, but I didn’t fully trust him.
“Dude, Herbie wants to see you,” he said, trying to seem as matter-of-
fact as possible but really coming off as worried.
“Mr. Johnson?” Scott called him Herbie, always out of earshot, but allthe same I hated when he did that. When I heard the name “Herbie,” thename played over and over in my mind, and I worried that I might blurt itout sometime in front of Mr. Johnson.
Scott nodded quickly, like a child would do.“Did he say what he wanted?” I asked, already dreading the encounterI  was  about  to  have.  I  had  a  lot  of  filing  in  front  of  me  for  the  day,  plusI  wanted  to  trade  again.  I  wanted  to  show  my  wife  another  good  day  of
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ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
profits. Maybe I could go one more point past 30 today, and get $310. Thatwould be awesome.
“No, he didn’t say what he wanted,” Scott replied, interrupting my day-dream. “In fact, he just left a voice mail for you, which as usual I checkedbecause you never do.”
I  smiled  weakly.  “I  wanted  to  check  the  market  before  I  got  started
with work today. It’s why I got here early.”
Scott nodded. “I’m sure you have a few moments. Let’s fire it up.”We did. And things were hopping! There were already seven AmazingForex orders open—all but two were profitable. I looked at the most re-cent order: It was an order to buy the British Pound against the U.S. Dol-lar—the GBP/USD—and the trade alert had just come through 5 minutesago. It was only 10 points in the negative right now.
Scott  brightened  up:  “You  can  trade  that  right  now  and  get  a  betterprice than they suggested.” I thought about it, and he was right: They hadsuggested buying the GBP/USD at 1.8100, and it was now at 1.8090. Thatmeant that we could get in on a profitable buy trade and at a better pricethan had originally been suggested. I opened my trading platform and en-tered the order.
Whoosh! I liked that sound. Now we only had to wait for the profit toappear. We also had to keep an eye on the Amazing software, so that wewould know when to exit. Yesterday we had exited in a gleeful pandemo-nium resulting from my first profit. But now I was committed to exiting thetrades when the software told me to. I rubbed my hands together. I forgotabout the filing that I needed to do. I expected the profit to come quicklyagain, but after a few moments had passed, the trade still did not budge. Iwas down $50.
“Why is it negative from the start?” I wondered aloud.Scott answered quickly. “You’ve got to pay the spread. You can buy at aprice higher than what you can sell for. That’s how the broker makes hismoney.”
“Ahh,” I answered. The spread. Okay. That made sense. So I would benegative from the start of every trade. But Amazing Forex had been givingsuch good trades that usually I didn’t notice this. Minutes passed.
It was 8:29 A.M.I heard a booming voice down the hall. It was Mr. Johnson. I heard myname  being  called  and  remembered  that  the  big  man  wanted  to  see  me.Oops. I had an open trade! I expected it to be closed by now. I was becom-ing uncomfortable with this trade out there in cyberspace. I should havesome profit by now!
“Harry, he wanted to see you first thing when you got in.”“I know.”“And he knows you get here every day at eight-fifteen A.M.”
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19
“I know.”What could I do?Scott smiled at me and said: “I will get out of the trade right when thesoftware says to. You go talk to Herbie. Here’s a pen and a pad so you cantake notes while he is yelling, and here is a tissue in case he spits on you.”He handed me these things as if he were preparing me for battle.
I did not want to leave Scott in charge of my trade, but I had no choice.“Don’t do anything else. Just close it when the software says to close it.”“I will. I won’t move.”I started on my way to Herb’s office, glancing over the top of my cubi-cle on the way out. I couldn’t see the screen because I had moved my mon-itor. This meeting with Mr. Johnson could last for a half minute. Or it couldtake an hour.
Herb Johnson was the managing partner of the firm. Newly elected, hewas  in  the  position  he  was  because  he  could  get  things  done.  He  was  afirst-class  operator.  This  Napoleon-shaped  man  could  return  two  phonecalls, scribble down a defense strategy, and scream at an associate lawyerall at the same time. He had earned more money for the firm in fees thanany other attorney in the firm’s history, he had brought in more clients, hada reputation for speaking his mind clearly and loudly, and scared the crapout of anyone who worked for him. When I arrived at his office, he was al-ready screaming. Not at me yet, but at someone on the phone.
Instead of ending the phone call like most humans do, he simply putdown the phone—didn’t hang up, just put it down on the desk—and staredme down for a good 30 seconds.
Was he going to fire me? Maybe.Promote me? No way.Yell at me about missing documents? Oh, yes. That was going to be it
for sure.
“Banes, you’ve done it again,” he growled. I heard what he was saying,but I was really thinking about my trade. Could it be possible that I was al-ready making some money? Ohhh, money. How I loved it. How I longed tosee the trade! It must be very profitable by now. I wondered how long itgenerally took an Amazing Forex Profit System trade to reach its profit tar-get. Maybe I would call the company later that day and ask. But for now, Icould nearly smell the profit wafting over the cubicles to me; it was a sweetscent that I hoped to smell again many times that same day.
I  imagined  myself  sitting  by  the  midnight  blue  water,  reclining  on  a
lounge chair. An attentive server was approaching me:
ATTENTIVE SERVER: Mr. Banes, would you like another drink?ME: Why yes. I’ll have another virgin strawberry daiquiri.ATTENTIVE SERVER: Of course.
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ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
Mr.  Johnson  was  still  yelling  when  I  snapped  back  into  the  presenttense. He was blabbering about some lost file, some letter that surely de-manded  legal  redress  for  the  wrongs  done  to  our  firm’s  client  blah  blahblah.
When Herbie was really upset, he growled, and his growling increasedas he talked. “It’s the most important file in this whole damn office, Banes.It’s the Anderson case, the trader. The bonus discrimination case.”
He  said  this  as  if  I  actually  cared  about  Anderson,  or  his  case,  orwhether the file had been shredded with the receipts of Herbie’s gifts to hismistress.  I  did  care  about  trading,  though,  and  when  Mr.  Johnson  said,“trader,” it made me even more excited to go check with Scott to see whathad happened.
I wrote some notes down on the pad of paper that Scott had given mewhile  Mr.  Johnson  continued  his  tirade.  I  didn’t  have  to  take  any  notesabout the case, which Mr. Johnson was now describing in the most specificdetail.  I  knew  this  case  because  it  was  on  the  front  pages  of  every  NewYork business section. We were representing a Wall Street firm—one of thebiggest  securities  firms  in  the  world.  The  firm  was  accused  of  paying  asmaller bonus to a physically handicapped trader, or something like that,to force the trader out of the firm. I didn’t know all the details, but I knewthat  the  case  was  Herb’s,  that  it  was  producing  huge  amounts  of  filingwork, and that meant that it was producing huge fees. I stopped drawingmy portrait of the managing partner, and asked: “Which document specifi-cally do you want me to find?”
He  stopped  talking  and  stared  me  down  again  for  what  seemed  likeforever. I thought at any moment he would pounce on me, his little DannyDeVito  frame  scrambling  across  the  desk  to  rip  out  my  throat  or  some-thing. I took a step back.
The phone was still sitting on his desk, and I could barely hear a voicecalling  out  to  him,  wondering  where  Herb  went.  I  think  Herb  was  partlyglad I had interrupted him so that he could get back to billing three peopleat once.
“It’s a letter,” he answered, as he started walking around his desk topick up his briefcase. As he described the letter, he was already in the pro-cess of doing something else entirely. When he finished letting me knowwhat I was supposed to go look for, he looked up at me and said, “Take itdown to the 31st floor, personally, and tell Mr. Anderson that I want him tocall me and let me know that you delivered it.”
So this was the punishment: I was messenger boy for a morning. Thatwas  perfectly  fine.  I  could  stand  that,  especially  since  there  were  moun-tains of Anderson files that my team and I were going to have to work onfor the rest of the day. And now I could check on the trade!
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21
As I ran back to the file room to grab the letter, which I immediatelyrecognized and which I had personally placed in the correct location only24 hours before, I noticed Scott walking down the far hall of the office. Hewas more than 50 feet away and it was impossible to yell loud enough toget his attention. That meant that he wasn’t watching the trade!
I bolted back to my desk to get the update. But the screen was blank—just a screen saver. The Amazing software was closed; the trading accountprogram was no longer open. And I had no idea where to find Scott. And Ineeded to deliver the letter pronto.
Then I heard Mr. Johnson’s voice booming from down the hall. Reluc-tantly I left my desk, determined to never again leave it while I had an opentrade. Having to delay my knowledge of the outcome was going to kill me.
MY EYES ARE OPENED
I needed a special code to even get the elevator to stop at the 31st floor. Onexiting the elevator, all I saw in front of me was a small lobby, with furni-ture  that  appeared  to  have  never  been  used.  Brass  letters  spelled  outERNEST  WELLINGTON  AND  COMPANY  above  the  secretary  whoguarded the desk, and behind her was a steel door that fit in very nicelywith the wood trim in the rest of the small room. I stated my purpose, shemade  a  phone  call  to  check  my  identity,  and  then  she  turned  around,swiped a card through a slot, and the steel door unlocked. She pushed itopen,  and  while  turning  around  and  leaving  me,  said  something  which  Inever heard. In fact, I almost had to cover my ears to protect them from thenoise I now encountered.
I  could  feel  the  door  close  behind  me—it  hit  me  in  the  butt—but  Ihardly moved. I was staring at the trading floor of a major Wall Street firm,and I thought I had been teleported to another planet.
There  were  at  least  20  rows  of  desks,  formed  in  a  giant  half-circle,starting directly in front of me, and extending out all the way across thefloor to the other end of the building. At least 200 men and a few womenwere  yelling,  pounding  on  their  computers,  and  watching  their  screens.There was so much happening right here, just a few floors below where Ihad been working for 11 years.
I  forgot  entirely  about  Anderson,  and  just  wandered  onto  the  floor.Glass windows looked out on midtown from the west side, and every otherwall had glass conference rooms, one after the other, mostly empty. Abovethe conference rooms were screens: Some screens showed what were ob-viously quotes on stocks or bonds or whatever, and some showed what ap-peared  to  be  news  conferences  from  around  the  world,  with  closed
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ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
captioning but no sound. I felt as if time stood still for me and was movingat 1,000 miles per hour for everyone around me.
It was chaos.Walking a few feet forward, I stood next to a guy who was probably 21years  old,  and  he  was  screaming  into  his  phone  something  about  sellingstock in November for some price that I cannot remember. The man nextto him was at least twice his age and had his head in his hands, and didn’tlook very happy. The woman down one more seat was poking her fingerinto her trading screen, and saying something to the guy next to her aboutCommitments of Traders, and how she was owed a case of beer.
And this scene was repeated, row after row, until I was dizzy. I heardpeople talking about millions and millions of dollars. As I walked furthertoward the center of the floor, I heard a trader say to the guy next to himthat he had just dumped a million shares of GE. A million shares of GeneralElectric? That must have been worth tens of millions of dollars. How didhe get those shares? Upon whom had he dumped them? Why did they buythem? How did the dumpee feel about all of this?
There is a time in one’s life that is a wake-up call. This was mine.Maybe it doesn’t happen to everyone. It might have happened to youwhen you learned about trading or peered over a friend’s shoulder to seehim making trades. It’s a moment when you feel as if you are just wakingup out of hibernation and realize that you have been missing life for at leasta few years, if not your entire prior existence. I forgot completely about myopen trade on the GBP/USD and thought: These men and women are mak-ing enormous amounts of money by trading. I had thought that $300 wasbig time.
No, this scene in front of me was big time. It was the biggest time of all.I had never seen so many people this animated, this excited, this de-pressed, this wild—all working in the same room, talking about dumpingtens of millions of dollars of shares on someone else. Something clicked in-side me. Or it was more like something snapped.
I knew this is what I needed to be doing. Already I knew that I wantedto trade. Already I knew that I had the talent to do it—but this trading floor,this mass of chaotic buying and selling: This is what I wanted to do for therest of my life.
There could not have been a more ridiculous thought at the time. I hadtaken just one trade of my own. I was a file manager in a New York lawfirm, with ninth-grade math skills and a diploma from Ben Cardozo HighSchool. Surrounding me at that moment were men and women educated atsome of the finest universities in the United States—I probably was stand-ing among more than a hundred Harvard Business School graduates. It wasjust as likely that I’d be made partner that same day in my own law firmwithout a law degree, not to mention a college degree.
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23
But I knew what I wanted. I wanted to do what these people did.Now, I remembered my trade. Seeing all these people in a state of vio-lent anxiety over their trades made me feel part of the group. A member ofa brotherhood of traders who worried about whether their trade was prof-itable. Just like me.
“Hey, Mack, you lookin’ for somebody?” a voice called out to me.I could not tell where it had come from, so I just answered while I was
looking around the room, “Anderson. Looking for Anderson.”
“Over in front of you, keep walking, to the conference room. You look
like you stepped in something.”
If  I  had  been  able  to  identify  who  was  talking  to  me,  I  would  have
asked about the current price on the British Pound.
Copies of the Wall Street Journal were everywhere, but most of themwere unopened. The sports sections of the New York Daily News and NewYork  Post were  opened  across  one  out  of  three  desks,  at  the  least.  Mosttraders wore casual clothes. If a guy had a sport coat of any kind, it wasstrewn over the back of his chair or on the floor.
Everywhere  I  looked  around  the  trading  floor,  there  were  computerscreens  and  on  those  screens,  charts.  Not  so  different  from  the  charts  Iwould  see  if  I  watched  business  news  on  television,  which  was  mostlynever. Every trader I could see—in fact, all of them—had at least three flatpanel computer monitors, and some had four. At least one of those screenson each desk was showing some form of financial charts. The charts stillmade no sense to me. But obviously they were indispensable. It was onemore thing I was going to have to learn.
Instead of spending more time gawking at the trading operation, I de-cided I’d be better off just getting over to see Anderson, and then gettingback upstairs to check on my trade.
I hurried to the conference room where I saw a thin, blond man, withwire glasses and a bow tie, standing by a sea of papers on a glass confer-ence table. Although he had boyish looks, it was obvious he was an impor-tant person around here, just from the way he stood at the table in deepthought, with his hand rubbing his chin. Maybe it was his ability to look socalm while there was so much madness happening right on the other sideof the glass conference room.
He grinned at me when I opened the door.“You must be Harry Banes,” he said in a quiet voice. I would not haveheard  him  if  the  glass  conference  room  walls  had  not  been  surprisinglysoundproof.
“Yes, that’s right. I brought this letter from Herb.”He put out his hand to take the letter and smiled warmly. “How long
have you been with the firm?”
“About 10 years.”
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ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
“How is it, working with Herb?”I was not about to lose my job from a stupid comment, so I answeredas honestly as possible. “We’ll be working more closely now that he’s thesenior partner.”
“True. Where did you go to school?”I didn’t really understand what he was asking, so I said, “Cardozo.”“Oh, that’s a fine law school,” he said.For a moment I thought about correcting him—I hadn’t gone to Ben-jamin  Cardozo  law  school.  I’d  gone  to  Benjamin  Cardozo  High  School.What he didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.“You from the city?” He asked.“Yep, born and raised.”“Who did you have for Corporations?” He asked, never letting his eyes
off mine.
I must have let my eyes fall out of my head at that moment, because itwas  easily  apparent  that  I  had  no  idea  what  he  was  talking  about.  So  Iacted like I hadn’t heard him and stared out the window.
“Busy day today on the trading floor,” I told him. I said this with a matter-of-fact tone, as if I visited trading floors all the time and was pleased to seeeveryone busy at work.
“Sure is. CPI rocked the markets this morning. Sent stocks way up in a
hurry.”
Stocks were irrelevant. My buy trade on the GBP/USD was far more
important.
“And the dollar?” I asked.He grinned. “So you’re a student of the markets, I see.”I nodded. “I do a bit of trading myself.”“Well, then,” he said, “You’ll be happy if you’re short dollars today.”Short dollars? That meant selling dollars. I had bought British Pounds.This should not have been so confusing, but it was. I had bought the GBPtoday, which meant that I had sold USD, which meant that I was short dol-lars. And he was telling me that the dollar had gone down! That meant thatmore sweet profit was waiting for me upstairs.
“Actually,” I told him, “I should be short dollars as we speak.”This pleased him immensely. “Fine, very fine. We need to make sure
that we keep in touch. Anyway, about Corporations, who’d you have?”
Now I was screwed. “I’m embarrassed to say that I don’t even remember.”With a quiet chuckle, he let me off the hook. “Too much trading, I pre-sume! Understood. Skipped corporations myself. By third year, I was skip-ping  class  and  calling  my  broker  to  place  trades.  I  paid  more  incommissions in my third year than I made in profits on every trade.” Andthen  he  patted  me  on  the  shoulder.  Thankfully,  our  discussion  about  mylaw school experience, which I never had, was nearly over. He continued.
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25
“Well,  catch  up  on  some  of  your  corporations  material—because  we’regoing to form an in-house forex fund, and we’re going to need a lot of helpon  that.  We’ve  got  investors  from  all  over  the  place—some  in  mainlandChina,  some  in  the  Middle  East.  Will  probably  raise  some  eyebrows  andneed some background checks. This is not just the ordinary setup. We’reputting five billion behind this to start.”
Five  billion  dollars?  Whoa!  I  am  happy  he  hadn’t  asked  how  much
money I was making on my trades.
“Tell  that  to  Herb  when  you  get  back.  Tell  him  we  might  need  some
help with the fund and he should call me.”
All  I  could  say  was,  “Will  do,”  and  then  I  got  out  of  the  conference
room as quickly as I could stumble over myself.
I  walked  across  the  entire  trading  floor  to  make  my  way  back.  Onceagain,  it  seemed  as  if  time  stood  still  for  me  while  it  moved  for  every-one else. I felt like I was on a people mover, or a ride at Disneyland; I couldn’tquite wrap my head around what I was watching and hearing. It didn’t matterthat I took my time, anyway, because I knew my trade was okay, and I knewthat I wanted to soak up as much of this experience as possible.This was a wild ride that I was going to have to repeat.On the way back to the office, I hoped that Anderson and I could talk
again. Imagine how much he could teach me about currency trading!
Since I knew that my trade had done well, I stopped by Herb’s officefirst. Poking my head in his office, I gave him a thumbs-up sign, to let himknow I had delivered the letter. He was talking on the phone, had two otherattorneys in the office with him, but still took the time out to say, “Don’tever misplace a file again, or you’re fired.”
I don’t know what came over me at that point, maybe all the yellingand testosterone from the 31st floor had rubbed off on me. I looked him inthe eye and said: “Well, don’t look in the wrong place next time, or you’llhave to call me again.”
Then I walked away, positive that I was going to get fired and feelingreally good that I had stood up for myself. Wow! Just a few minutes in themidst of all those traders, and I had recaptured my optimism. It hit me sohard when it came back that I got chills up my spine.
I could be working down on the 31st floor, I told myself. If I wanted to,I could work there. And if Herb fired me, I could just start trading on myown. I should be trading for a living already. That was where I belonged.
The job didn’t really matter. The overdue rent didn’t matter. The creditcard debt seemed so much smaller. No matter how suddenly I had foundthis new path, it was pointing in the right direction. And I was going totake it.
As I walked down the hall, I heard Herb loudly call to the other attor-neys, “Well, let’s hope to God he didn’t talk to Anderson that way. Head of
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ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
trading for the entire operation, and he probably walked in there and toldhim to find his own letters from now on.”
I stopped cold. The head of all trading? Anderson? The thin, pale guywith  the  Nerd  Club  for  Men  glasses?  That’s  the  person  I  had  talked  to?Most excellent! My new friend on the 31st floor was a master trader!
The wheels started turning in my head. Could I go back down there?Could I ask him a bunch of questions about currencies? Would he offer mea job? What would I say? In this moment of supreme confidence, it seemedlike a great idea.
Even if Anderson didn’t want to sit and talk about currencies withme—he was certainly a very busy man—maybe he would let me justwatch the traders for a while and learn while sitting there. Yes! That wasa good idea. I literally propped myself up against my cubicle to keep fromfalling. How much time had just passed? Twenty minutes from the time Iwent downstairs until now? An hour at the most? Maybe I should go backdown there immediately and ask if I could watch the traders for the restof the day.
But I had a trade to check on. How much profit had I made? Another$300? More? When I get a flash of euphoric optimism, I believe that I amking of the world and all humanity should bow down before me and do mybidding.
I found Scott in the break room pouring himself a gigantic cup of coffee.He smiled when he saw me. “You’re gonna be happy.”“I knew it! I knew it! Tell me the good news.”“You got 20 pips, bro!”“Pips?”“Points. They call them pips in the forex market.”“Just 20? Not more?”He  lowered  his  voice,  like  he  was  about  to  tell  me  a  secret.  “Well,  it
was something like four hundred dollars in profit.”
I knew he was lying. Making $400 was impossible on the trade if he justgot 20 points, or pips. I had traded again for $10 per point, and he had made20 pips. That was $200, not $400. I told him this.
“Well, that’s true. But I exited your trade at 10 pips when the software
told me to get out. And it kept moving up, so fast, so I got in again.”
I was nervous, happy, and upset all at the same time. “You got in again?
Did the software tell you to?”
“No, but it was moving up fast! I had to get a piece of that for you.”“And you got 10 more pips?”“Yep. I traded three times your usual trade size so I could make more
money for each point.”
Oh, gosh, I thought. I had never thought of that. I could trade for morevalue per point, or pip, when I really thought the market was moving fast.
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27
Scott was right in doing that for sure. But I was still not happy that he hadtaken a trade without permission from the software.
He  was  drinking  his  coffee  in  big  gulps,  obviously  excited  about  hisperformance that morning. And I could not be too angry with him. Why, Ihad started with $1,000 a day ago, and now I had $1,700. If I could nearlydouble my account value every couple of days, this was going to be the eas-iest money I had ever made.
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CHAPTER  4
Two PromisingConversations
Because I knew that I could trust John Murphy, I stopped by his office
He  was  happy  to  make  time  for  me.  “How  is  your  daughter?”  he
later that day.
asked.
I gave him a blank stare and said, “She’s fine,” in a way that clearly toldhim it was a strange question. I had forgotten the lie that I had told the daybefore about the emergency room.
“You’ve got a great new office.” The view was amazing from where we
sat—we were looking out over midtown Manhattan.
“Thanks. This actually used to be a partner’s office. Charlie Flank. Heleft to start his own practice on the East Side, writing wills for rich peoplewho want to leave everything to their poodles. Anyway, when Charlie leftthe firm last week, Herb let me move in.” It was obvious that John hadn’thad much time to move in. Some of Charlie’s stuff was lying on the floornear the door: a photo of Charlie with Mayor Bloomberg, a coffee mug with“MS Walk 2002” on the side, and a box of business cards. John continued:“Of course, I begged Herb to let me have it, so I could finally have a view.So what’s on your mind? Is this about the firm’s benefits?”
I then remembered my lie. “Oh no, not that. My daughter’s doing muchbetter  now  and  everything  worked  out.  I  appreciate  that.”  He  nodded,happy to know that he had cared deeply about a problem that I had