Transcription
[Music] I haven't actually really thoroughly introduced myself, in the sense of how did I end up being here. About 25 years ago, I read this book. I was a young man in Denmark; I was just turned 20, and this book was my epiphany. I realized I want to go to Britain; I want to study. So I read Liars Poker again; where could I study? London School of Economics, etc., etc. I work two jobs because, back then, there was no government support. So I put—I took myself through two universities' degrees by my own real oddity. But I was stinking lucky because, in 1992, Britain was fighting a currency relationship they had called the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, and it was a dreadful, dreadful thing to be part of because it meant they had to protect their currency within a band versus all the European currencies. And I was incredibly lucky, ladies and gentlemen, because if I had walked down to the bank just a month earlier, I would have gotten nowhere near the amount of money that I did when I exchanged my Danish Kroners into British pounds. And I'm more or less—it doesn't happen often—but I'm more or less caught the low. I made an extra 30% on my savings, which meant that I could afford to take a master's degree at the University of Birmingham, where I studied money, banking, and finance. After which, I started working for JPMorgan.
And for those of you who are the early signups, I never traded for JPMorgan. I think it's very important to make sure that you know the saying is that a lie can travel halfway around the world before the truth gets out of bed. And I didn't want a knock-knock from JPMorgan saying, "You never traded for us." I certainly, most certainly did not. I traded for myself; I traded for all those, but I haven't traded with JPMorgan. As much as I loved to trade for JPMorgan, I think I could have done a better job of some of them. I work for JP Morgan for three years, and then I became a home trader for 18 months. And ladies and gentlemen, you would have laughed at the way I traded; it was hilarious. I didn't actually have a computer. Do you know how I got my charts back then? We had Teletext. Do you—he's the older generation that are present here—do you remember Teletext, where we could get—it was like an early version of getting news on our mobile phones? Well, every third minute, Teletext would update the quotes from the stock exchanges. So I sat there on the refresh button; every third minute, I would write it down, and then I would actually chart it by hand. Until one day, my brother took pity on me; he worked for IBM, and he said, "I have a secondhand computer, you can have it here." And I finally got a computer, but it didn't last long. The result was predictable, of course; it was predictable. I was never going to make money trading on a tight budget. And 18 months later, I accepted a job at a company called Financial Spread Better City Index. Over the next decade, I was broker, an analyst, chief market strategist, until 2009 when I left, and I've been trading for myself ever since.
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