Derek Trucks at the Beacon Theater 2011

photo by TG

A Moment of Clarity

Tomorrow will present an opportunity to give thanks that I won’t soon forget.  I know you’ve heard all about it on a topical level, but I’m here to provide some inside color.  The lessons to be learned from a Category 1 hurricane temporarily inundating your hometown with the Atlantic Ocean are monumental. 

The first hurricane head fake came when meteorologists started hyping the storm.  For a change, they nailed this one.  I had advance warning from a heroic power trader in Baltimore who was in front of it by 10 days.  I knew my town was in trouble because last year Hurricane Irene came and went with 75% of our locals sticking around to laugh at Al Roker.  One week after that hurricane Long Beach, New York, of all places, was treated to its finest hour when 100 year surf conditions provided a playing field for the best surfers in the world to compete for the NYQuiksilver Pro Championship.  This time, we wouldn’t be so incredibly lucky, but we’d learn something.

The stress level created by the storm, the unbelievable surge, and then the aftermath is a lot to bear for a blue-collar beach community.  The City of Long Beach had just elected new leadership, for better or for worse, and cut spending and raised taxes to cover its $25M budget deficit.  Then Sandy hit causing billions of dollars in damage.  Neither the savings accounts, nor the tax receipts of a town with a median income of $76,000, were going to pay for those billions.  Consider for a moment that I had no idea what condition the town was in during the wee hours of October 30th.  I was left to reading the “market” signals.

I firmly believe that having a background in trading is useful in any time of crisis.  During a low-grade natural disaster, daily staples like power, gasoline, cash, and south shore pizza become a luxury.  Fending for them brings out the extremes in human nature; and you can read the sentiment signs through catastrophe like you can read the warning signs through a trade. 

  

At around 11pm weather channel predictions came to fruition and the Frankenstorm surge reached its peak of 10’ feet above sea level.  A few of those locals were watching their cars get entirely submerged from the 2^nd floor of their two-story home as the ocean poured into their living room right up to their flat screen.  Down the block from them in the “canals” area of town - 6 homes were in the process of burning down to the water line in a matter of 2 hours.  We were indeed on the lows in the middle of the night and I was praying for a bottom.  Text messages of desperation now read “Dude make it stop!!!”

On my first return trip to Long Beach on the morning of Tuesday, October 30^th – I admit – I couldn’t believe my eyes and was highly skeptical we would see any modicum of normalcy for months to come.  The town was a warzone, covered in debris and burned-out zombie vehicles.  There were parts of our boardwalk on front lawns five blocks away, vehicles were smashed through parking garage walls like Matchbox cars, and four feet of sand covered the roads along the beach.  The water decontamination plant had been knocked totally offline and we were at square one in determining when, if ever, we would have power again.  We’d just been taken down several notches of living standard and gone straight to primitive. 

Locals immediately began the arduous task of pumping several feet of water out of their basement with gas powered generators and carrying the waterlogged contents of their life out to the curb.  I will never forget the looks on the faces of my friends, family and neighbors facing the seemingly insurmountable task of first cleaning up after one phase of their lives, then rebuilding the next one.  Put yourself in their boots for a moment.  All at once, that is a consideration your brain cannot handle.

House after house, block after block - waterlogged furniture, wallboard, carpets, mounds of insulation piled twenty feet high.  Beautiful God fearing people reduced to zombies in filthy wet work clothes. It was time to queue up my crisis salvation song by Derek & the Dominoes.  “It’s Got to Get Better in a Little While.”  Repeat.

I knew while watching my 6-year-old niece crying out loud at the sight of her playroom being deposited on the curb, dripping with black-water from a freshly gutted first floor, that the situation had reached a dark sentimental bottom.  Despite the mess, the loss, and all of her tears - the sun rose again.  The next time I saw my niece laugh hysterically – I got the chills.

In the days that shortly followed, the National Guard set up throughout town and the industrial clean up revved into full gear.  Having the support of your iphone, text message system, email box, and twitter feed fill up with calls of concern provided the first chance to get your spirit off the mat.  In short order a friend from Connecticut offered to make a midnight run to deliver 20 gallons of gasoline, desk mates and market buddies offered to come down and pitch in with the clean up, professional saxophone players were available in tool belts for the rebuilding process, the ice arena where my children skate was converted into a massive supply station as donations arrived from every corner of the country.  Help was pouring in from neighboring towns in the form of man power on school buses.  People were so eager to help us that my faith in human nature spiked to the top of my screen and I have all of that to be thankful for this year.

On the first Saturday after the storm I was proudly part of a 50 man team that gutted 8 homes in 12 hours.  That’s a lot of tonnage moved for charity and something we’ll always be proud of.  Some day in the future – the clean up and the rebuild will define this episode, not the destruction or the despair.

After that herculean effort, to borrow a phrase from Jules Winnfield “I was sitting here, eating my muffin and drinking my coffee and replaying the incident in my head, when I had what alcoholics refer to as a moment of clarity.”  Ok I was drinking a cold Bud can outside and eating a hot dog, but I’m the farthest thing from an alcoholic.  In partially soaked and entirely filthy work clothes, I realized how damn lucky I am.

The most important stat was that there was no loss of life in my town.  Everything that everyone was forced to part with on short notice was either of material or sentimental value.  The truth is – in short order the material loss will mean nothing.  Aside from Rockaway Flu, we have our health and a big job to do, but we can look each other in the eye knowing we have the will to get it done.  It didn’t seem possible 2 weeks ago but we are going to have a 1^st Grade Turkey Bowl and monstrous Thanksgiving this year after all.

If there is a town on Long Island with a Kevlar backbone, it is the town of Long Beach and that is a testament to the people.  “Beach Creatures”, as I refer to my local brethren, want for very little.  How much can you actually want for with a median income of $76k? 

I realized in my moment of clarity that it is not money or the possessions we’re after.  It is to be able to call our beautiful beach town home and have that cohesive bond motivate us to full recovery.  We are all longing for a run on the boardwalk, to watch our kids play sports on local fields and for 12 hour days on the beach that end riding waves with the family until the sun goes down.  A few thousand more man hours, donations, FEMA checks, automobiles, generators, renovations, prayers of love & care and we will be sitting on the beach enjoying that sunset in no time.

Still one thing that you can do;
Fall down on your knees and pray.
I know the Lord's gonna answer you.
Don't do it tomorrow, do it today.
- Clapton

Roots in the '87 Crash

During the actual crash of 1987 I was a sophomore at Cornell so I was playing billiards at Noyes Center, playing fall ball on North Campus, or playing hoops at Barton Hall while the market was unraveling.  My Dad was in his foxhole – the Over the Counter trading desk at Dean Witter where he spent all 30 years of his trading career.  Having started at Dean Witter in 1969 he was a veteran by 1987.  He ran with some big dogs back then.  His boss Jerry Mullins, his friends Buzzy Geduld, Ronny Weiss, Jack Genovese, “Gus from Troster” were names I heard at my dinner table, names a lot of old timers in this market would recognize as titans of the trading industry.

I didn’t catch up with my Dad about the market until later that week but I remember learning a few great lessons when I did.  The news flow was all about blood in the streets and suicidal traders but I remember my father talking about it like just another crazy trading day at the office.  And maybe because finding a career rooted in “craziness” was right up his alley.  I don’t have a picture of him from 1987 but everyone used to say he was a dead ringer for Jack Nicholson in the Shining.  He’s the kindest man on earth but he’s got the devil in his eyes and I think that’s what made him a Wall Street survivor and humble success for three decades.

I asked him if we lost a lot of money as a family and he said “a little.”  I asked him if he lost a lot of money at work and he said “yeah a lot at first, but then once I figured out what was going on I made it all back by the end of the day.”  I had just learned there was opportunity for a 'come from behind victory' – at work!  I was highly intrigued by my first connection that there was some sort of dealer in the middle of this mess that could buy and sell, get long or short and navigate markets by instinct.  I can promise you my Dad wasn’t studying fundamentals when he got home from work at night.  He was and avid runner and reader of Popular Science listening to Earth Wind and Fire on a Technics turntable.

The other thing I learned was that my Dad didn’t put too many of his hard earned eggs in one basket.  I asked for an explanation why most people sounded so fatal about what happened but we only lost “a little” money and he just answered something along the lines of “that’s why I don’t invest in the stock market.”  He was quite aware that the career he built for himself, a gift from God to support our family, was directly tied to the health of the stock market.  Back then there was always a running joke in our large Italian Family about where everyone’s life savings was kept.  Hint, it wasn't all in the bank.  We still do the same kind of thing; we just graduated from a mattress to a safe.

“In 1987 everybody tried to go to the exit at the same time, but the exit door wasn’t big enough.  You had literally a panic. Fast forward to 2012. The volumes we can handle are gigantic, but the exit door hasn’t changed in size.”
E.E. “Buzzy” Geduld, Founder of Herzog Heine & Geduld and Cougar Trading, LLC

Grateful Dead Spring 1990 Skull Illustration

Dark Knight Trading

Wednesday August 1st notched yet another day in the trading twilight zone.  It all started when news circulated that Lewis Bacon would be [foregoing $40M in fees and 20% of whatever he could earn in the markets being privy to insider Fed meetings] returning $2B to investors.  In closing he said that “Markets are increasingly distorted by central banks attempts to squeeze drops of growth from an over-indebted private sector.”   Listen Louis – I couldn’t agree more…but you’re killing me giving up on this business.   [Head does one rotation, counter clockwise]  

Simultaneously, all hell broke loose in over 100 stocks.  To illustrate trading hell by the numbers:  In some names 5X the average daily volume was directed to be executed "market on open", 148 stocks had to be investigated, 40 unsuspecting listed companies more dislocated more than 10% from last sale, trades were later cancelled indefinitely in 6 different names, and for laughs China Cord Blood Corp more than doubled in price.  [Head does one rotation,  clockwise].

Yes, these orders were entered IN ERROR by a human and directed through algorithms that were thrown into a market already dominated by 70% algorithms (because traders are lazy anonymous sheep most of the time).  For 45 minutes algo-bots attacked single names and we had another un-tradeable financial tempest in a tea pot.  There is certainly human error involved but to address a few arguments mindlessly floated out there by hard working floor traders - this IS a system failure.  Human error has safeguards built in common sense.  

If it this isn't system failure then tell me what would happen if a professional floor trader with a badge took an order to SELL, for example, TWO HUNDRED MILLION SHARES OF PFIZER on the opening.  The hair on the back of his neck would stand up, his heart would race, but his gut would blurt out to the order bearer:

 "ARE YOU [EXPLETIVE]’ing FOR REAL?"

To rant within a rant - I always wonder why portfolio managers and execution traders aren't FIXATED on NYSE openings - it is the only time of day you have a clue where "VOLUME AT A PRICE" is going to trade and you can try to game it as you like.  If all traders committed to the patience of a proper stock opening they would take the auction process out of the hands of the specialist and put it back in the hands of the interested parties.  But no, sadly in this version of Wall Street the buy side only likes to play poker after midnight at the Soho Club.

So we've been paying close attention to all the events that undermine global investor’s belief in this ultimately fragile financial system.  Some of them make the platform we are trading on feel like a road side tree house in Jurassic Park (and make me bullish gold) so let's do a recap.  

Starting in real time going backward we are watching the toxic fraud known as the Facebook fall off our screens, we had global exchange BATS go BATS$%T crazy on its own IPO day, we had a veritable IPO cancellation parade down, and back in an ominous October of 2010 we had “THE FLASH CRASH” when some guy in the mid-west evaporated $4 billion dollars in a simple miscue.  Forget about the implosion of real volume in a central bank waste land trading atmosphere - all of this is taking place while (another branch of!) self regulating authorities launch phony investigations and throw out buzz words like "structural cracks", "technology issues" and "market glitch."  Somebody rescue us from this market structure hell.

Why can’t we wake up Mary Shapiro & Co. at the SEC to demonstrate that she is useless but her job abundantly secure.  Go ahead - take the floor and please explain why this trading cesspool remains in a broken condition and then tell us who is condoning it?

All this monetary and mental capital blown to smithereens all so that the NY FED could safely transform itself from a client of investment banks, in theatrical irony, to trade under the same conditions as the hacktivist global brain operates – for to trade in an algo is to trade ANONYMOUS like an expressionless man in a theater mask. 

In another gross coincidence of Hollywood entwined with reality – stock ticker gone dark – KNIGHT SECURITIES [KCG] was the patsy in this unbridled computer shit show.  Thank God the damage was only the massive and abrupt loss of somebody else's money.

Later in the day the Fed warned it would end Zero Interest Rate Policy Forever no earlier than late 2014, another desk worth of five year traders was fired, equity traders put on shorts the market will never be let them out of and everyone went home. 

The next day everyone came in trying desperately to forget any of it ever happened.

PHISH Jones Beach Theater Experience 2012

The Dave Matthews Band Jones Beach Experience 2012

Memorial Day 2012

If you would like a friendly hip check to shake yourself into a Memorial Day gait then I would like to be the one throwing it.  The words of Tom Manion did it for me this morning as I try to imagine Memorial Day through the soul of the father of a fallen Marine.   I will tell you right now as a lowly middle class sales trader, father of three children ages 6 through 9, I can barely type straight right now.   The thought of being in Tom Manion’s body to receive news like that has me welling up, trembling and hyperventilating.  

You would have had that conversation with yourself long ago and made peace with the concept of your child going to war for this country and assigned some probability that they could die for it.  Not necessarily die for the High Tech Ass Kickin' USA that Thomas Jefferson dreamed about and the one that you hold near and dear to your heart, but for the one that tends to embarrass us along the global landscape today, forcing us to close our eyes and grab our forehead in disgust.  We’re better than that yet we live in a place where a banker or government official can evaporate billions of an innocent parties funds with the swipe of an unethical transaction and still collect a paycheck at his mansion in the ‘burbs but there's a chubby pitcher from Texas with stretch marks at his pectorals on the stand of a high court because of the inconsistencies in his testimony.  Roger Clemens should answer every single question “don’t we have bigger fish to fry, Your Honor?  Where the hell is Jon Corzine?”  THAT would be bread and circus.  

So I spend a lot if time in this space complaining and tearing down the system in an attempt to expose some of the fraud, unfairness and depraved behavior that contributes to a slow decline in the morality and credit rating of a great nation.  After all we have accomplished then why do we wake up every day trying to succeed or achieve something, and maybe raise a family to represent our next generation against the backdrop of bad behavior and a fire hose of decrepit news flow.  My daughters love Hannah Montana movies but the internet is flooded of pictures of the teenager pumping gas with no bra on Hollywood Blvd. and far worse.  Billy Ray might be fine with that.  I am not fine with that but it’s the message that is being sent.  If we keep raising the debt ceiling, one day our currency will collapse and we, or our children, will be living through a brutal currency devaluation.  Yet we are first treated to a charade, and then we borrow more money.  Do as we say not as we do at work, at every level.

For me, it’s just tough love.  Discussing the absurdity is really because I want Americans to hold themselves to the higher standard we all deserve.  The standard our nation’s military has largely upheld and died for.  Our ancestors went through all the trouble and epic loss of life to get themselves from a group of people looking to be left alone to worship their God to arguably the world’s most powerful economy and democracy in a few short centuries.  We’ve demonstrated an uncanny ability as a nation to bounce back from adversity and like John Mellencamp sings - NowMore Than Ever it is important to do it again.

Life is inherently unfair and I can deal with that but let’s not allow Manion, Rozanski, Snyder, Douville, Looney, and thousands of others that died for this country before them to have done so in vein.  Let’s start by holding ourselves to a higher standard, and then those around us will too.  Let’s take a page out of Duane Allman’s book and take love where we find it and offer it to everyone who will take it, to seek knowledge from those wiser and try to teach those who wish to learn. I'm sitting here wishing we could all just be back on the gold standard and the honor system and I truly believe that if we did everything would be ok. 

That’s not going to happen so we are going to have to do the best with what we have and rely on the hope that most of human nature is good.  I still believe that livin’ in the USA, we are afforded a much richer life than living most other places on the globe and that we have those who have died serving their country to thank for it.  My guts may come up trying to finish but I’m going to complete a Memorial Day Murph’ this weekend to say thanks and I think y’all should to.  Now more than ever the U.S.A. has to pull itself up from its bootstraps and rigorous training is necessary for sound mind and body so get out there and get after it.

If you believe
Won't you please raise your hands
Let's hear your voices
Let us know where you stand
Don't shout from the shadows
Cause it won't mean a damn
Now more than ever…

Van Halen 2012 Madison Square Garden

 

Taken with Nikon Coolpix 7100.  Review to follow.  Video posted Slipkid Live link at right.  Click the first picture to start a slideshow.

Have some Van Halen in 2012 it's good for the soul.