Anecdotal Posting with regard to Sept 11th.
Hello Jump Off, I have just finished my day so I have some time.
This question of Airline puts would be misunderstood by the great majority of people, because in order to undestand what it is in its correct context you have to be a trader. As you say, if the market is already showing indications of weakness professionals are not going to go against the flow unless a bottom is anticipated. In the absence of this no one in his right mind goes long in a short market.
When a catastrophe like this occurs, you will always remember what you were doing at the time and so on. On that day, I was in Spain, in Marbella, and I was having lunch with a group of friends who are not traders and know nothing, absolutely nothing about markets, or trading, or anything with regard to this but, like many people in ordinary life have a lot of "opinions".We were sitting in an open air restaurant called "Los Naranjos" (The Orange Trees) No doubt there are members who know it because it is famous.
Just as we were about to order, my mobile (cell phone) starts ringing. I answer it and to my utter consternation and amazement it is one of my people who was holding a short position in Dec S+P futures initiated two days previously on the basis that the market was weak and trickling down. He starts yelling (very unusual for him) unintelligibly and asking if I have heard anything because he says the market is plumetting but with huge volatility at the same time and this kind of decline is something he has never seen before. At first he thinks it is an error, then he thinks it is a world war, then he thinks he doesn't know what to think, there is nothing on the news (my friends are very alarmed at all this) then I ask him to call the progression of the raw numbers, and in fact he is dead right, this is not an ordinary price waterfall, it looks like a crash, because there is no apparent floor but the reason is not clear.
The market now begins to fall, seriously fall and he begins to panic. At this moment his wife bursts into his office. I will tell you that this is also very unusual, because in my circle we do not allow interruptions from visitors or any sort whilst a position is running, ever. It transpires that in a garbled sense she tries to explain that there is a newsflash from the US that the twin towers have been hit by planes and the first live pictures come out. I tell him to ignore the news and just concentrate on the price and its progression. This he continues to do. By now his position in well in the money. The fall continues and according to what he is telling me I now give him a snap instruction to put in an order to buy at limit 20 or so points under the current latest. H does this, and manages to close his position 8 points off the bottom. I now congratulate him on his spectacular trade.
We now turn our attention to what the news channels are revealing. We all leave the table and walk across to a shop that sells TVs and there is a huge crowd on the pavement (sidewalk) crowding the entrance to the shop, the shop windows, huge. Now my friends who see all of this turn on me, because of their perspective, and start saying this is a tragedy and you should not use it to make money out of it and other irrelevant nonsense. The crowd who hear this, now start shouting at me ! I can tell you I will never forget the experience. It took a week for a couple of them to venture to speak to me again.
I tell you this because this is what can happen to any trader who allows "civilians" to enter his domain.
Ordinary people have great difficulty in separating the concept of taking advantage of a trading opportunity because they percieve it (incorrectly) as taking advantage of a catastrophe.
I have also just remembered how it was that in the middle of the Wall Street Crash of 1929, Jesse Livermore was inundated by very nasty phone calls from members of the public accusing him of having caused the crash. He took every call that came in and tried his best to persuade each caller that it was not the case, until the poor chap ran out of patience and had to give up and turn his attention to his trading.
I tell you all these things because there exists in the popular imagination the erroneous concept that speculators and traders are inhuman or immoral creatures. Nothing could be further from the truth. The problem lies with the inability of non-traders and non-speculators to understand all of this.
I never did have my lunch, the rest of the day was spent sulking and arguing the point,
but I must admit I spent days afterwards viewing and re viewing the news, which filled me
with horror and sadness, to me it seemed like a horror movie, unreal almost, horrendous, very tragic and a testament to the stupidity and wickedness of which human beings can be capable.
