I spent most of working life abroad in developing countries. In most of the places I lived and worked there was no television, and telephone communications were limited. We listened to BBC and VOA to get the news. There was no way to get market information from the other side of the world. No one had computers. Bill Gates was still in grade school. In fact, even '4-banger' calculators had not yet appeared. It was pencil and paper for everything. The slide rule was the quick way to do some arithmetic work. The internet was nothing but a glimmer of a dream, if that. So though I was interested in the stock market, there was no way to really participate in it.

The development of personal computers and broad band internet coverage has changed all that. Here in the Philippines the World Wide Web made its appearance in the early 90’s with cranky, unreliable dial-up e-mail accounts using 14k modems. It took more than ten years to reach broad band status. At that point I saw the beginnings of a long-awaited chance to get into the market.

In 2006 I was able to work out a radio link from my property in Kapatan, to an internet service provider in General Santos City (GSC), 17 line-of-sight miles away across Sarangani Bay. In Singapore we found a UHF (ultra-high frequency) radio to set up the link, and finally got it installed with both radios lined up with each other, and able to operate in duplex mode. (That is, to be able to send and receive at the same time, like a land line telephone.) The radio link tied into a dedicated server line (DSL) in GSC. I had my internet access! It wasn’t long before I was ready to get into the action. Or so I thought.

As it turned out, trading stock options is not for the untrained and inexperienced. Getting trading experience without training was not the way to go, since one would be almost certain to run out of money before learning much of anything. I had to get training. That turned out to be expensive, but I can now see that I was correct when I assumed that it would be cheaper to get organized training than to do without it. I began my training in mid-2007, and at the same time started to get incorporated as a securities trader. I got into the market in March 2008, just in time for the big 2008 crash. Talk about getting experience the hard way! It felt like a couple of years at Harvard Business College. That was almost 2 years ago, and I am only now beginning to feel “OK” about the way things are going. I have stand-alone broker trading platform software on my computers, and am managing 4 separate trading accounts all with the same broker.

So I live in Mindanao, and work in the US. My computer clocks are set to Chicago time, because my broker is in Chicago. Options trading is big in the Chicago market, with trades also done in New York, Philadelphia, and sometimes the Pacific coast. Most activities are based on New York time. So I go to work at 11 PM, 30 minutes after the markets open in the US. I work for a couple of hours, then get some sleep until 3 AM the next morning, when I rise to get in on the last hour of the trading day in New York, 4-5 PM. I get off work at 5 AM here, go upstairs and have a cup of coffee with my wife, who has just gotten up. I go back to work about 2 hours later, and do my paper work, including the recording of the days trading activities. Lunch at 11:30, then a 2-hr nap. I get 2-3 hours sleep after dinner, before the work day starts again at 11 PM that night.

So I work a 5-night week. There is not much discretionary time left in the daylight hours. Like most working people, I get Saturday and Sunday off which I use to catch up on personal things, and catching up on sleep. Thank God It’s Saturday!

-=<()>=-