versus your personal life? I generally try to keep my trading confined between 8 A.M. and 6 or 7 P.M. The Far East is very important,
and if the currency markets are very active, I will trade the Far East, which opens at 8 P.M. The A.M. session in Tokyo
trades until 12 P.M. If the markets are in a period of tremendous movement, I will go to bed for a couple of hours and
get up to catch the next market opening. It is tremendously interesting and exciting.
To see the wave roll from country to country? Absolutely. When you are really involved, the screen almost reaches out and grabs you. The way the quotes
are made changes: They get wider; they get wilder. I have contacts all over the world in each of these markets and I
know what is going on. It is a tremendously exciting game. There are opportunities all the time. Forgetting trading for
a minute, one of the reasons I am in this business is that I find the analysis of worldwide political and economic
events extraordinarily fascinating.
The way you describe it, you make the whole process sound like a constant game, rather than work. Do you really look at it that way? It doesn't feel like work, except when you lose—then it feels like work [he laughs]. For me, market analysis is
like a tremendous multidimensional chess board. The pleasure of it is purely intellectual. For example, it is trying to
figure out the problems the finance minister of New Zealand faces and how he may try to solve them. A lot of people
will think that sounds ridiculously exotic. But to me, it isn't exotic at all. Here is a guy running this tiny country and he
has a real set of problems. He has to figure how to cope with Australia, the U.S., and the labor unions that are driving
him crazy. My job is to do the puzzle with him and figure out what he is going to decide, and what the consequences
of his actions will be that he or the market doesn't anticipate. That to me, in itself, is tremendous fun.
