WEEK     JOB: STOCK TRADER

LOCATION: FORT LAUDERDALE, FLORIDA

DURING MY WEEK as an exterminator, I heard from Andrew, the stock trader who purchased my plane ticket to Miami.

“Sean! Andrew here.”

“Hey, Andrew.”

“Look, I spoke to my wife, and we’re on for next week.”

“That’s great!”

A New York City stockbroker at heart, Andrew is now a 40-SPF local on the beaches of Fort Lauderdale. He spent most of his life in New York City, and it’s evident in his accent and the fast-paced work style he brings to laid-back Fort Lauderdale. He left because he hated the cold and wanted to be the big fish in a small pond. Whether managing over $70 million of client assets with his investment firm, Horowitz & Co., writing books, updating his money blog, or producing a successful investment podcast, Andrew always had something going on.

“How many hours a week do you work, Andrew?” I asked, curious how he found time to deal with everything.

He laughed and said, “You don’t want to know. It’s zero to one-twenty in ten seconds with me. Strap in!”

After we got off the phone, I wasn’t surprised to see an email from Andrew a couple of hours later, outlining my homework for the week as well as the dress code. He gave me a few resources, then asked that I be prepared with the list of companies that would be reporting earnings on Monday and Tuesday. Also, he wanted me to find out the important items that would be reported regarding the economy. He added, “After you do this, then I’ll show you what really matters.”

The job of a stock trader is to make money for clients. The more money they’re making, the better job the trader is doing. I wondered if this relationship would alter a stock trader’s perception of success. To Andrew money is just the means of keeping score—it’s the challenge, excitement, risk, and decision making that attract him to the profession.

“Success is all within yourself,” he said. “Be happy first, make sure what you’re doing is making you happy. There is nothing worse than getting up on a Monday and saying, ‘Ugh, I don’t want to be doing this.’ There is an amazing number of things out there that you can do—you just have to go for it. You always have to go for it.”

In college, the stock market really excited me. For a while I thought that I’d get my trading license and become a stockbroker. In the end I decided not to. I figured it was something that I could always do for myself on the side without having to do it full-time.

I had noticeably more energy this week. Even though I didn’t get much sleep, when the market opened and there was money on the table, I got a jolt of energy. The job demanded it. There was a lot at stake. A day trader—a trader who buys and sells stocks within the same trading day, so that when the market closes, he has no stocks left—must be engaged constantly or risk losing a lot of money in a matter of minutes. Over the first two days, we had a total net profit of $5,500 and handled approximately $1.75 million. Whenever I hear about such large sums of money, it doesn’t seem real. I can’t help but think of the board game Monopoly.

Andrew set me up with a computer next to him that had the same live trading program he used. I could see everything that happened in real time and make real trades. To find stocks of interest, we’d look at lists of the most active on the NASDAQ and NYSE to see what was “making noise.” We’d check on a particular stock; if Andrew liked what he saw, he’d call out a price and number of shares, then I’d feel the pressure to type it as fast as possible, click the Sell or Buy button, and hope that I heard him correctly and didn’t make a typo. Brokers would normally do this themselves, but Andrew brought me in on the action.

On the screen, I could see all the buy orders (in green print) and sell tickets (in red print) from other investors. Andrew told me that when there is an increasing number of buy orders coming in, that could mean that the stock is going to climb. Similarly, if there are a lot of people selling, looking to unload some shares, the stock price is likely to come down.

With a detailed graph on the screen, I could see the stock’s movement minute to minute as it slowly drew a line across the monitor. “What about these graphs?” I asked. “How can we use these?”

“One thing we can do is use support and resistance levels to help us decide when to buy or sell,” he said, pointing to the computer screen. “For example, let’s say a stock is selling for twenty-one dollars, and that over the course of the day it’s been trading at a twenty-one-to-twenty-three range. Every time it approaches the twenty-three price, it seems to plateau and back off slightly. And whenever it approaches the twenty-one-dollar range, it holds its ground and doesn’t seem to dip below. We could then set our support level at twenty-one dollars and our resistance level at twenty-three. This would be our range. When buying comes in from investors that begins to breach these resistance points, we’d look to either buy or sell.”

“Okay, seems simple enough.”

He laughed. “Well, there are a few other factors to consider. Did you bring the information I asked you to find?”

“Yeah, I did,” I said, pulling the papers from my computer bag and handing them to him.

“The reason why I asked you to do this is that typically when a company reports earnings, there’s going to be more activity with the stock price,” he said. “And when there’s more movement in the stock price, there’s more opportunity to make money on the margins.”

He flipped through my findings and continued, “Likewise, if there are important items reported regarding the economy, we can watch to see how the market is responding to the news. If some stocks are fast-moving, breaking out, we might want to get in there, pick up some shares, and ride it for a bit.”

I enjoyed the excitement of the markets, but I don’t think I could handle all the ups and downs on a daily basis. It requires tough nerves, discipline, and the ability to recover quickly after a big loss or gain. Andrew admitted, “While you have control of what you do, the market and the prevailing economy have the ultimate control. And unfortunately with the incredible amount of stress involved, it sometimes is very overwhelming.”

On my last day, I felt I had a good grasp of everything—I read the charts, predicted where a certain stock would go, and decided on what would be good buy and sell points. After I made the right choice on a few hypothetical trades, and after I could have been, hypothetically, $5,000 richer, my confidence grew.

The stock that I analyzed was Crocs, the shoe company. Overall it was a bad day on the market and the stock was down, and I thought for sure that it was a good buy point.

I turned to Andrew. “Hey, Andrew, can I put a buy order in for five hundred shares at thirty-eight dollars?”

He took a look, then said, “Sure, go for it.”

I bought in.

I leaned closer to the computer. My eyes fixed on the screen, I tried to read the graphs based on what Andrew had taught me. Now it was up to me to decide.

Immediately the stock began to look positive.

“That’s right, keep it going, you can do it,” I egged on the Little Shoe That Could. I thought about selling but decided I’d hold on a bit longer.

My phone rang.

It was a reporter from the local Fox News affiliate. They wanted to interview me.

“Sure, no problem,” I said as I tried to concentrate on the direction of the stock. “But you’ll have to meet me at the airport.” I paused. Many sell orders appeared on the screen. “We have to leave for the airport within the hour.”

“Okay. We’ll meet you out in front of the departure terminal,” he confirmed.

“Good. Bye.”

My attention shifted back to the stock. It started to creep downward. I glanced toward Andrew. He was busily trading. I sat there in silence as I anxiously watched the stock drop below my purchase price.

If I sold, I’d be down. It would mean that I’d made the wrong decision to buy. But if I held on? Maybe the stock would turn around; maybe it would come back up and I could break even. It couldn’t possibly go down any further.

It did.

All of a sudden it wasn’t black-and-white after all. I was no longer looking at graphs, hypothetically making trades. I wasn’t hypothetically rolling dice, moving around the board in my silver race car, casually picking up prime real estate, building some hotels, jacking up rent, emptying out the bank’s supply of $500 notes, then tossing all my paper money into the air. A quick calculation and I realized I was dealing with some serious money, the real kind. Close to $20,000.

An alert popped up on Andrew’s computer because the price had hit a certain low point. “Ah, you watching Crocs there, Sean?”

“Yeah. It’s not looking too good,” I said. “I don’t understand. It shouldn’t be down this much.” Crocs had released some good news that morning, though I hadn’t taken into consideration that the whole market was down.

Andrew got up and stood over my shoulder. The stock trickled down further.

“Are you going to just sit there and watch it go down?”

I stared at the computer intently and begged it to change directions.

“This is real money, Sean,” he said with urgency in his voice.

The screen lit up red with another string of sell tickets. It has to turn around, I thought. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t want to accept that I’d lost the money. It wasn’t my money to lose. Now that Andrew was watching the stock too, I thought, Okay, he’s got my back on this one. How much could he really be willing to lose to teach me a lesson? The stock continued to dip.

“The stock doesn’t care about you, Sean. You must decide when to cut your losses.”

I got my answer: “Enough.”

I put in a sell order, it quickly went through, and just like that, it was over. I’d just lost $1,000. I felt terrible.

We watched the price drop further.

“This is getting ridiculous,” said Andrew.

I was just glad that we got out when we did. I felt even better that the attention was now focused on the abnormal movement of the stock and off the fact that I’d just lost a thousand bucks.

“Sean, go back in for another two thousand shares,” Andrew quickly said.

“What? Really? Are you sure?” That was four times the number of shares that I’d originally purchased. At $34 a share, we’d be in for $68,000.

“Yes, do it now!”

I tapped the keyboard, clicked the mouse, and we were back in the rapids.

Then the Little Shoe That Could, unhindered by its different appearance, started to climb.

We both stood and cheered on the stock as if we were at the racetrack urging our bet to push further. I had to be at the airport in twenty minutes in order to have enough time to check in. We had to leave. But the stock still climbed, then climbed higher, then passed my original purchase price.

“You should hang on to it,” I suggested. With the good news released that morning and the market upturn late in the day, it’d surely climb higher.

Andrew put in a sell order. And within seconds all the shares were sold. Then, as if it was part of his lesson plan all along, he calmly said, “Number one rule: A day trader never holds a stock overnight.”

I exhaled deeply. “That was the most stressful forty-five minutes of my entire life.”

Andrew smirked. “Welcome to my world.”

We quickly gathered up our stuff and rushed out the door to the airport. In the end, we were up $5,000 on the day, with an invaluable lesson learned—no matter how many models and techniques you have to help predict what direction the stock should go, the bottom line is that the stock market is unpredictable.

Andrew ripped into the departure terminal and abruptly stopped in front of the sliding glass doors. I spotted the news van parked outside, the reporter and camera guy waiting on the sidewalk. I ran past them with my luggage. “I’ll be right back.”

I made my way to the check-in counter, got my boarding pass, and checked my luggage.

“How much time do I have until they start boarding the plane?” I asked.

“They should be starting to pre-board any minute now,” she said.

I ran outside the terminal. Andrew was with the news crew.

“Okay, let’s do this,” I said.

“We’ve just been told by an airport representative that we’re not allowed to film on the premises,” said the reporter, in no hurry at all. “We’ll have to go off the property.”

“I can’t. My plane is boarding soon.”

“It’ll only take five minutes,” he calmly assured me.

I looked at the ground, then glanced toward the airport terminal, then back at the ground. “Fine. Let’s go.”

Andrew and I hopped into the back of the van. There were no seats, only various equipment and cords strewn about, so we were forced to crouch. The driver pulled around the loop.

“How about there?” I suggested. “Pull over there.”

He slowly pulled over on the grass at the side of the road. I quickly hopped out of the car. “All right, here we go.”

The camera guy pointed the camera at me, and the reporter asked, “So, how did this idea come about?”

In one go, I spewed out all the answers to every question that I imagined he could ask. I explained how I’d started the project, my promise to seek passion, how employers offered me jobs, where I stayed while on the road, how I traveled from city to city.

“My favorite job so far was probably at a brewery, or as a cancer fund-raiser, or at an ad agency, or maybe when I was a yoga instructor—I don’t know, they’re all so different [my answer changed every time]. My worst job was working twelve-hour days in a smelly swamp in the scorching heat. The biggest thing I’ve learned so far is that the real world is not such a scary place after all.” I exhaled and smiled.

“Okay, let’s go. I got a plane to catch.”

We piled back into the van and made our way around the loop back to the departure terminal. As we arrived at the sliding door, I turned to Andrew, both of us crouched down holding on to the back of the headrests for support. “Thanks for a great week, Andrew. You were right, it really is zero to one-twenty in ten seconds with you.”

He laughed. “You’re going to need that speed to catch this flight.” The van stopped.

“Till next time,” I said.

I grabbed my computer bag, hopped out of the van, and ran through the sliding glass doors toward security. They called my name over the intercom as the departure gate came into view. I stepped onto the plane, and the flight attendant closed the door behind me. I jostled my way down the aisle, then tossed my computer bag into the overhead compartment. My heart raced, in stark contrast to the calm setting of the airplane. I sat down, exhaled deeply, and took in my new surroundings. I couldn’t help but wonder how the other passengers had spent their last few hours. Some people quietly read their book, or listened to music, or watched television, or slept. Some sat motionless, staring at the back of the seat in front of them, while others passively attempted conversation with the person next to them.

One scene ended as quickly as the next had begun.

I was off to New York City.