12/07/2020 — The Wisdom of Shitgen

On a slow trading day back in Autumn of 2006, a man now known as Shitgen foretold all the ways that the trading floor and the financial industry would forever change me. Just a lowly arbitrage clerk on the catwalk overhanging the SPX pit, I listened raptly to a litany of habits and behaviors both large and small that I would adopt in the coming years. Shitgen’s prescience that I would begin to view many mundane transactions and exchanges through the lens of market making intrigued me. He warned that the speed of the floor would make me impatient with the snail’s pace of the outside world. But his eyes lit up, and he smiled like a madman when he told me that I would have dreams about trading.

I found the diversion interesting mostly because I was bored on a slow work day, but I didn’t take this fortune telling to heart. In my mind, I already had one foot off the floor and into something else. I would not be making markets on sporting events. I would be making amplifiers in a workshop, and the blissful vision of my future endeavors had no room for frequent, violent, high-blood-pressured outbursts at the smallest inconveniences.

So when I got the call from my father last night informing me that the market had finally broken, and that the S&P futures were already down 60 points on a Sunday night, I thought of Shitgen and how right he was. I couldn’t believe that fifteen years later I was still a slave to the market, but an early bedtime called as the prospect of a morning full of trading opportunities left me drooling.

A 4:30 AM glance at my phone revealed another 50 point market evaporation and I found it hard to get back to sleep, so I went out to my garage and worked on a project for a while. My neighbor stopped by a bit later and we had a bit of breakfast which caused me to lose track of time and miss the market open. In rush I headed to my office, but my computer was broken and I couldn’t get into my account…

…and then my alarm went off. In bed I checked my phone to find that the futures had rallied another ten points. I dreamt the whole thing.

Disappointed, I poured myself a big glass of water, walked to my office with my functional computer, and sold a lazy one lot to the ether.

Damn you Shitgen!