Once I had my university degree in Economics from University College of London in hand I decided it was time to uproot 6 years stay in London, England and move to the USA for a change. I settled in New Jersey where I had a half brother (still have), who was working in Manhattan in the financial world trading Futures.
We had talked about me coming over to work with a company that also dealt with futures trading and that we owned together with the rest of my siblings. Since my half brother was in full time employment he had the need for someone to aid in getting trades done for our own company and not least program a special software for pattern recognition and back test this against 20 years of data. My brother had vast experience in the trading and I was a quick learner of the software’s near English programming language that we soon had a very elaborate program that could trade on automation by recognizing specific market patterns that prompted our buys and sales.
Tested against the 20 years of data we were brilliant super-millionaires and had maximum draw downs almost next to nothing relatively speaking. In other words if we had followed such a program to the point throughout those 20 years then our performance would have been stellar. But past performance is not always guarantee of future performance and trading just on paper is vastly different than trading real money and we also had limits to how much we could afford to trade and afford to lose if this would be the case.
Futures trading is fast and can be very exhilarating, but it lacks any personal influence on the market. There is also very little you can do in order to turn a knob or two if things do not quite pan out the way you wish it to go. In other words I missed the possibilities that you have when running a typical business in which you can turn up on your sales efforts if you are lacking results while perhaps reduce some of your costs at the same time and end up with much improved results. In futures trading you really are gambling. Perhaps with some degree of probability and with experience from how the market typically reacts to certain events and perhaps with some fairly great measures of risk management, but in the end, it does resemble quite a bit: Gambling.
This was the reason that I ended my tenure in the Futech Trading company after just about one year and instead returned back to Denmark in order to start working in more grounded business – the business of car rentals.
