Rushing me out the door Nick handed me the red Jacket. The badge read, "PAX". Nick stopped, eyed me up and down and exclaimed, "My God man, where are your bloody trousers?". "My trousers?" I stammered, "What the hell are you talking out?". "You can't go onto the floor in jeans, you'll never make it past the front desk" he said whist unbuckling his belt. Right there and then, in the middle of the software development area on the third floor of our London office he took off his trousers and told me to put them on... Dumbfounded I complied, surprised that they fit. He handed me the Cisco router and yelled, "Now get down there!". It was a short distance from Cannon Street to Cousin Lane, the floor of the Liffe exchange, where I set foot onto a trading floor for the first time in my life. That was 1998 and I was an IT guy from the back woods of Canada who thought he knew everything, found himself working for a group of Market Makers in "The City of London" and starting to realize I didn't know anything at all. This scenario repeated itself several times, me and Nick's trousers, and "PAX"'s jacket where I would rush down to the floor to fix one technical problem or another. Two months into my new job I got a call from one of the partners, Will in Amsterdam. They were having intermittent connectivity issues and he wasn't happy about it. Anything less than, "I'm getting on a plane right now" was less than acceptable so two hours later I found myself on the train from Schiphol Airport into Amsterdam Centrum to find my way to the AEX to figure it out. By now I had purchased my own "bloody trousers" and less than forty minutes after arriving in the Netherlands for the first time in my life I was on the floor of the AEX. The problem wasn't with the equipment at the floor though so Will had one of the clerks show me to the office, a converted terraced house, on a Canal near achterzijde voorburgwal. The problem was with an ISDN line and KPN Telekom were like every other telco on earth, they sucked, so I worked late into the evening to resolve the issue. By 22:00 Central European Time I walked out of the office, relieved that I had done my job and shocked at what was standing in the window of the building next to our office. I was 25 and, like I said, from the back woods of Canada, and I had absolutely no reason to know about the Red Light district in Amsterdam. But there I was, and there _they_ were, mostly naked, in the windows up and down the street. As I got to know Will I wasn't surprised that the office was in the Red Light district but I was certainly surprised that night.
How does one go from swapping trousers with Nick the Developer and loitering around Amsterdam to becoming a trader? Curiosity and luck I suppose. The Market Markers sold their operation to a big bank in 2000 and all but two of the Partners took the golden handcuff. I had already left and was working for a Data Center startup building out infrastructure all over the EU. It was incredibly hard work, the VC capital was running out, and demand for 20M Euros worth of data centres just wasn't there yet. When the two Partners that didn't go with the bank invited me to help them setup their own shop in Wimbledon Village I agreed and part of the deal was to teach me to trade. So I got them setup and they taught me to trade and from 2001 to 2005 we all made money. By the end of the second Gulf conflict volatility was starting to dry up and markets were beginning to trend again. This wasn't good for what we were doing and it was taking longer and longer for positions to come in. I returned to IT, starting my own technology company, for the next five years. All the while I dreamed of the day that I could return to trading full time because I had seen the massive potential the markets can provide.
In 2009, for personal reasons, I shutdown that company and returned to Canada. I'd saved enough money to be able …