That phase of almost exclusive cocoa trading obviously came to an end. What happened? Helmut retired from cocoa trading.
I assume Helmut was not nearly as successful a trader as you were. Let's just say that I traded much better on Helmut's information than he did.
Excluding the early losing years, were there any trades that stand out as being particularly traumatic? Well, I would never let myself get caught up in potentially intimidating disasters. The worst situation occurred
during my heavy currency trading period. I was doing well and could afford to hold large positions. One time, I had a
really large position in Deutsche marks when the Bundesbank came in and decided to punish the speculators. I called
in just around the time that all this was happening and found out that I was out $2k million in about five minutes. So
I got out, rather than see the $2k million loss go to $10 million. Then I had to endure the disturbing experience of
watching the market recover its entire fall.
How long after you got out? About half an hour.
Did you go back in? No, they had taken the starch out of me by that point.
In retrospect, do you feel you did the right thing by getting out of that trade? Yes, but it still hurt to realize that if I had sat it out and done nothing, I would have been OK instead of losing
$2 million.
Did you invest any of the money you were making in your trading, or did you keep plowing it back into your own account? I made a number of bad investments and lost a fairly large chunk of the money I had made trading. When I
was trading big, I wanted to have a reason to keep doing it, so I just spent money wildly. At one time, I owned about
ten houses and ended up losing money on all of them. Some I sold before I had even spent a single night in them. I
had a plane charter service and lost a lot of money on that. At one point, I figured out that for every dollar I made
trading, 30 percent was going to the government, 30 percent was going to support my planes, and 20 percent was
going to support my real estate. So I finally decided to sell everything.
