You are talking in terms of customer business? Customer business and trading. The market had gotten so voluminous that my style of swing trading was
worthless. It got to the point where I was just trying to read the next tick instead of the next 8 ticks.
Why couldn't you play the same game? The volume was too big; capitalization was too big. I couldn't read the market from the floor.
Because there were too many players? Exactly. In the early days of T-bond futures trading, the depth was low and you could read when people were
overextended long or short. You couldn't do that anymore.
Did your performance start decreasing; did you see the handwriting on the wall? In 1985,1 made under a million dollars trading for the first time and I knew something was wrong. I had
always been a very consistent trader, making more money each year. I looked at my results and found that my
profits were smaller, meaning 3 and 4 ticks, and my losses were greater. My first reaction was to become a much
more active pit trader. I found that I was taking on tremendous positions and the risk/reward was insane. That was
when I became convinced that I had to make a change.
Were you just lucky that you didn't get hit really hard during that period on any particular trade? Actually, I did get hit pretty hard a couple of times, but I had some good winners too. The point is that as I
worked harder and harder, I found that all I was doing was running in place. I don't like to work hard at trading, and
here I was just mentally and physically exhausting myself.
If you had been doing as well as in previous years, would you have stayed in the pit? Yes. The pit is a very stimulating environment. Off the floor, you have to force yourself to be motivated each
day. That was a very difficult transition.
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