Good position traders, or block traders as they are sometimes called, are valuable commodities and often prove to be an integral part of your trading operation. Now-a-days, most position traders are focused on trading only one or two specific sectors allowing them to add more sector specific value to both their trading desk and to clients. Sector traders focus on news flow, relative trends and Industry leaders in their space. Since trading is where the rubber meets the road, it’s imperative that block traders be in tune with crucial levels, know where the bodies lie and keeping sales traders abreast of all institutional activity and news worthy events. Not all traders are good traders and can sometimes be harmful to your business.
We have recently gone through some management changes and like with most shifts in management, house cleaning was done and we had layoffs. We had this one trader, Frances, who was employed here for 17 years and must have had photo’s of the old boss banging some farm animal,because he was fucking useless, added no value and often proved detrimental to the firms business. Ever hear the saying, “He couldn’t trade his way out of a paper bag”? There’s no doubt that who ever came up with that expression – had this tool in mind.
This guy had the charisma of an ingrown toe nail. Trading stock is a technology game and if you can’t keep up and utilize the trading tools then it’s time for you to choose a new career path. Frances never evolved. Frances had only two tools in his belt. If Frances wanted to buy or sell stock, the only way he knew to do it was to call the floor or post bids and offers in ARCA. For those of you not in the business, in today’s day and age, this is equally as effective as trying to fuck a door knob.
Slowly stocks were removed from his pad one by one until Frances was left with only five. Five stocks! That’s all this guy did all day was wait for business in five stocks, and three of them traded less than 500K shares a day. Now, one would think the odds of a client coming in on one of his stocks were pretty thin…right? Yes and no. For the most part Frances just sat there all day allowing the moss to creep over his defunct body, until of course you had a client who you needed to impress come in.
Let’s just say you hustled for two years trying to get in front of a client, they finally let you up in their office where you get the chance to tell your story, explain to them how much their potential business means and highlight your superior execution quality. You can be rest assured, the next day when that phone rings, and your client came in to test the waters -it was Frances’s stock and you were doomed…. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck! It didn’t matter if it was a client that had you in the penalty box and this was their first time coming back in a month, the head portfolio manager for a $100B desk filling in for his trader or just some angry hedge fund trader getting his face ripped off on a bad energy trade. If the order was sensitive or important to you… Frances was about to test your broker-client relationship.
Frances knew only one way to operate. It didn’t matter how much you emphasized the importance of the order, how clear your instructions or how slow you talked to him. Frances would just give you that dazed look, say
This guy was just downright creepy. You know the homeless guy on the subway..? The really angry crazy looking guy with the violent shifty eyes that just sits there in his own pool of urine waiting for somebody to make eye contact so that he can pull out his wanker and scream obscenities. That’s what it’s like sitting in front of Francis. You’d be sitting there on the phone with a client or working something in the machines and you would actually feel this guy staring at you -always with his mouth half open like he was ready to blurt something out. It’s freaky. Since nobody wanted to talk to the guy, you start to feel bad, so every now and then you look his way and let him rattle off some random question. The way it works was like this… He would give me an erie look, I would give him the ‘what’s upt even make of sense.
Anyway, I would have bet the farm that this guy was out of the business for good, but I recently heard that he has been called back for his third round of interviews at a fairly well respected mid-tier firm. Go figure. Sometimes this business just has no rhyme or reason to it. The truth of the matter is, there’s a guy like that in every brokerage house. Everybody has their “go to” guys and everybody has their “We’re not the right call” guy. However, this jerk off has been gone for months now and I’m still trying to dig myself out of some holes he blew into my account package.
If you’re in a managerial position in a NY based mid-tier research boutique getting close to hiring a position trader who happens to be a very creepy looking Irishman with a neck the size of a Rottweiler, has blood shot eyes 24/7, lives in Bergen County and claims to have extensive customer relations in the midwest… Buyer Beware!
Enjoy the day,
Dopey
