The first thing you need to know about me is that I have made a living from financial markets for nearly forty years. I’ve seen and traded my way through it all… booms, busts, surges, and collapses, and I’ve worked in five countries: England, Japan, Russia, Poland, and now the U.S.

Now I’m going to share all that experience with you.

I’m sure you are wondering why I left the market at all, but to understand that you need to know a few things about me.

I got my start in the Interbank Forex market in the early 80s in my hometown of London. I’ll never forget the first time I walked into a dealing room there. It seemed to me like complete chaos.

All focus was on a circular desk in the middle of the room, around which sat about a dozen young men. What was so striking was that every one of them was screaming and shouting at the same time. Screaming at each other, into phones, at the screens in front of them, at the walls… it didn’t appear to matter as long as they were screaming.

Within a few months, I would be one of them, and all the screaming would make perfect sense. There is a chaos to traded markets, but there is also an order, and once you understand that order, you can survive, and thrive.

The beauty of a dealing room is that it is a perfect meritocracy. The only thing you make is money, and the only way you keep your job is to keep making it. I kept my job in that market for around twenty years, rising through the ranks until I was managing a desk, teaching others how to do it. Then I left on my own terms.

That is experience you can learn from.

The reason I left is not a happy one. My life, like that of many others, changed on September 11th, 2001. At that time, I was running a desk for my firm in Warsaw, Poland.

My wife’s brother, Richie Stewart, worked for Cantor Fitzgerald and was killed when the first tower fell. He was my wife’s only sibling, had not married, and had no kids.

It was immediately obvious that we couldn’t leave her mom and dad alone to deal with his death. I resigned, she sold her business, and we moved to America. We had no house and no job, with two young children and a third on the way.
I wanted to get back into the markets, but for obvious reasons, didn’t take any of the offers to work in New York. Instead, I took a job as an advisor with a big wealth management company in the south. In my naivete, I thought that my dealing room experience would come in handy.

What I didn’t realize was that the last thing the wall street firms want you, the customer, to know is what goes on inside the system.

I was told that the strategies I designed for my clients were “too risky”, even though they were based on risk management techniques that had been used in dealing rooms for decades. And even though my clients were making money and loved them, the real problem was that they were also designed to minimize fees.

I quit and was determined to use my forty years of experience in markets around the world to help people who preferred managing their own money. I started writing, primarily for nasdaq.com and deptransfer.wpengine.com, and that brought me here.

When five of the world’s top financial publishers got together to create a newsletter that would analyze energy markets and come up with actionable ideas for profiting from them, they asked me to write it.

Deep Earth Publishing is the result.

In it you will find the analysis style and trading techniques that I have learned over nearly four decades in financial markets. Along the way, I will give you some tips to make you a better trader, and probably tell you some war stories from the dealing room.

The focus though will always be on making money. That is the reason people get involved in trading and investing, and it is how I have survived some of the biggest market swings in history.

It’s gonna be fun…

Cheers,

M