I am Sheamus - Very Personal Development

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This site is about two big things:

1. How did I end up here?
2. What do I have to do to get to there?

It’s also about seven slightly smaller things, but we’ll get to those later.

For an ‘about’ page, this is kind of a big read. I hope your chair is comfortable. You should consider getting a drink and maybe a snack before we begin.

I’m 36 years old. Actually, 37 this year. Like many of my generation (and, indeed, those pioneers before us), I’ve reached that awkward point in my life where I don’t know what I want to be. I really don’t have a clue. I know what I didn’t plan on being, though - and that’s this.

What’s ‘this’? Currently, this is security. I’m a licensed door supervisor. That’s right - a bouncer.

Previously - and for many years - I’ve worked as a technical analyst and proprietary trader. Prior to that, I carved my niche as a waiter.

How I ended up where I am now is…

When I left school in 1988, having royally screwed-up my education - a pool table and a coffee machine in the common room will do that to a guy - I had a plan. I’d work that summer for my parents in their restaurant, save up some money, re-take my exams, and then go to University. I was going to be a journalist. Or a stock broker. A degree beckoned. Of that, I was sure.

Money does strange things to a person.

I mean, there’s money, and there’s money. I had the former - but even the modest wage my parents provided gave me a taste for the good life. Money means nights out and clothes and gadgets and stuff. But money mostly means girls, and girls mean money. Once you’re accustomed to an income, it’s very difficult to give it up.

Quickly, that summer became that autumn and that winter, and 1988 became 1992.

Late summer. I still want to be a journalist or a stock broker, of this I’m pretty confident. At this stage, I’m 21, and toying with the idea of entering University as a mature student.

And then a little advert in the local newspaper caught my eye: TRAINEE ANALYST WANTED.

Now this was very unusual. Adverts for that kind of position from that kind of company did not appear with any kind of regularity in my local paper. This firm was based in Battle, East Sussex (of The Battle Of Hastings, 1066 and all that, fame), which was literally just down the road from where I lived.

Back then, I had no idea what a technical analyst was. Most of my knowledge about the financial system came from Wall Street (1987), brief (but enthusiastic) dips into The Financial Times, and the second edition of How To Read The Financial Pages.

Naturally, the ‘trainee’ aspect of this position made all of that somewhat redundant. I interviewed for the job twice. I interview well. The company was a small one, but I hit it off with the guy who was basically the #2. I expected to get it.

I didn’t.

At least, not then. They gave the job to somebody else, but at the last minute he decided he’d rather go to University, too.

So they called me back. I was a trainee analyst for six months and a fully-fledged one for the next seven years after that. I took my FSA (then, SFA) examinations and got properly licensed as a futures and options analyst. (Eventually I would go on to take more FSA exams which would lead to the much-desired ‘general’ status, which basically meant I could legally cover any market.)

It was a good job. I liked the company, and the people. That stuff matters.

Then temptation reared its ugly head.

You see, when you’re an analyst, you have a database of clients. Each and every working day - and sometimes on weekends, too - I spoke to high-profile and very wealthy people from all around the world. These clients paid for this service. I wrote late-night reports five times a week on the major bond futures markets and then faxed or emailed them to the database. These reports were made up of an overview of the markets and a trading recommendation. Clients would then call me to discuss these trades. If the trades worked out well, you were a hero. If not, you were the absolute pits of the Earth.

For quite some time, my trades worked out well. This is both a blessing and a curse. It’s the former, because, as an analyst, it means consistent business, because clearly you know your stuff. And it’s a curse because, as an analyst, you’re only making recommendations and not actually doing those trades yourself, which always prompts two questions:

1. “If you’re so good, why don’t you trade yourself?” (Clients)
2. “If you’re so good, why don’t you trade yourself?” (The Analyst)

You hear this enough, and say and think this enough, that it consumes you. Why aren’t you trading yourself? What are you - chicken? How much can you know about yourself if you’ve never been in a fight?

And so, when one of our clients offered to set me up as a private trader, I jumped ship. This was 1999.

He set me up in my own office and provided a credit line for trading pretty much any market I desired. For various reasons, however, the project never gelled. With hindsight it was a combination of factors, most notably being limited to telephone-only executions of trades (nowadays it’s almost exclusively PC-based) and being too far out of the loop to really have the feel that is essential to a trader’s prosperity.

I had some ideas that I thought could be instrumental in revolutionising the business of technical analysis and the client, now my boss, was interested. Subsequently, we formed a research company and for a while things got very exciting indeed. This was at the height of the dot-com boom and that’s all everybody was focusing on. I had a 25 per cent stake in the firm, and was now a director. I was also the programmer, website designer, lead analyst, office manager, salesman and contact point for everything to do with the business. This, naturally, became a bit of a problem.

We quickly put together a young team of eager trainees, much like I had been back in the day, but the thing never really clicked. My boss was putting a fair bit of money into the firm and was insistent on doing everything by the book. Subsequently, it took us 18 months to get authorisation - and the much-needed green light - from the FSA to actually begin the business of client recruitment. By then, he had invested so heavily that our backs were very much against the wall. The team wasn’t working out, to a point we’d all become increasingly desperate, and ultimately he pulled the plug. The termination occurred in 2002.

It was a real shame. Looking back now, many mistakes were made, a lot of which were beyond our control, but the ideology was sound.

This, however, left me in somewhat of a quandary. For the first time in 10 years, I wasn’t working in the markets. I chilled for a little while, toying with the idea of doing something myself, but that wasn’t sitting well. I knew I didn’t want to go back to being an analyst, and I knew why: one thought continued to niggle in the back of my mind.

If you’re so good, why don’t you trade yourself?

And so I did. I analysed all of the mistakes I made and the obstacles I came up against before, and decided that the only way to do this properly, to have chance of making it work, was to up-ship and secure a job in the City - i.e., London. The Square Mile.

I still had a few solid contacts from my last job, and started making some calls. Eventually, I secured a position with a trading company - for various reasons, we’ll call them Tradex. When I joined, Tradex were a small trading arcade made up of approximately a hundred traders. Established in 1998, the firm expanded at an astronomical rate and when we relocated offices in 2003, had grown about five-fold.

At Tradex, like every other trader there, I worked exclusively on commission. There was no salary involved. Tradex agreed to back you and you agreed to give them an arranged percentage of the money you made from that account. Indeed, not only that, but to work at Tradex - or any other arcade - you needed to pay what is called a desk fee. Your desk fee was a monthly amount that was billed to your account that covered things like your computers, your trading license, your news feeds (i.e., Bloomberg or Reuters), and so on. This wasn’t cheap. My desk fee was around £2,000 ($4,000) per month.

On top of this, you had to pay for all of your trading costs, and these added up. Whereas you might only be paying, say, £1 for each single unit - called a ‘lot’ - you bought and sold in a market, nobody traded only one lot at a time. Some people traded thousands. I was never one of the biggest players, but on any given day I’d make anything up to a hundred trades and each one was in the range of 10-80 lots. That adds up: fast.

And this is before you’ve even made a penny for yourself.

When I first joined the firm, my share of my account - known as my split - was 60-40 in my favour. As one progressed as a trader, building up the account by making more money, etc, the split was improved (70-30, 80-20 etc), and a trader was given an increased limit on the number of trades they could do.

It takes a while to build an account, and it takes a while to become comfortable as a trader. We all have our own unique styles. Some people trade frequently and rapidly, entering and exiting many different positions in a matter of seconds. Others might hold trades for weeks, or even months. It is, however, essential that you find your own style. Trying to copy somebody elses or go against a way that you know is natural rarely works out to your benefit.

I talk fast, and I walk fast, and I think fast, and this inevitably meant that I would trade fast, too. And I did. You’ll have heard of daytraders. At Tradex, it was common for a trader to make many intraday trades. I rarely held a position for longer than 10 minutes. (There’s an old joke in the markets that ‘a long-term trade is a short-term trade gone wrong’. This can very much be applied to daytrading, too.)

I knew my stuff. I had lot of experience. I’d seen a lot of different kinds of markets. I was comfortable with myself. These things are all assets, and were lacked by many of the much-younger guys around me. The average age at Tradex was about 21; I was 31 when I joined. I had a family, a home, and responsibilities. They had none of these things. This, for me, was a major disadvantage.

Nevertheless, it wasn’t long before things started to take off, and I made some pretty good money. Being old-school - back in my analytical job, we used to compile and update most of our charts on graph paper, by hand - I specialised in an old-school market: the UK Gilt future. I also traded the European Bund and US T-Note.

I was commuting to work - a two-hour journey each way - but I never really minded that at all, certainly not at first. It gave me a great opportunity to read, or listen to music, or whatever. It also gave me time to think, particularly on the journey back home.

The psychology of the marketplace is absolutely fascinating. Indeed, that’s what it all comes down to - the mental. Making money is the easiest thing when things are going well for you. It’s like a dream job - you come into work, you make x thousands, and you go home. Who doesn’t want that?

But when you’re losing money, trading is the loneliest job in the world. Nothing isolates you faster, or makes you feel so desperate or powerless, than consistently losing money. Very quickly you can find yourself in a hole.

There’s an old adage amongst traders that is known as ‘easing the pain’. The option of easing the pain occurs whenever one finds one’s self in circumstances where the trade is so uncomfortable, and is losing so much money, that the only possible way one can feel good, can ‘ease the pain’, is to close the position out, even if it goes against common sense or the reasons that you originally entered that transaction have not changed. The gratification one feels from easing the pain is instant, and usually doesn’t last much longer. Then the self-loathing begins.

As I said above, for some time, for several years, things were going well for me. However, because of limitations and responsibilities in my private life, as well as time-related issues with having to commute to work (i.e., it was impossible for me get to work before 7.30am) I never really built my account up to the levels that I should have. This prevented me from taking things to the next level, and that next level is essential. One can make all the excuses under the sun and it’s easy to look back now and say ‘woulda/shoulda/coulda’, but there’s a reality there. For a lot of the other guys, many of whom were living at home and have next to no responsibility, it was very much a case of having nothing to lose. That’s a great position to be in, certainly in that business. Not being able to go for it when an opportunity presents itself really limits your remuneration.

Subsequently, after three years of never really seeing anything that resembled a downturn, I began to enter a bit of a slump in the summer of 2006. At first, it was not financial, it was mental. The markets were changing. The markets had changed. (I won’t bore you with the details, but for more on this, Google and read up about the appropriately named Paul Rotter, aka “the flipper”.) I started to lose interest. The skills I had - speed, knowledge, experience - were increasingly worth less and less in a market that was dominated by size and a carefree attitude to risk. That’s fine - things inevitably evolve - but it made life very difficult for me.

Then, I started to get into a bit of a trading rut. The Non-Farm Payrolls number had always been my friend; this time, it was my enemy. I lost a lot of money, and went on a bit of a losing streak.

Time passed; I made some of the money back, and things were looking okay. Then after losing a lot more during a technical glitch at work when my PC froze (these things happen; they’d happened before, and would happen again, and there was nothing you - or the firm - could do about it), I found myself quite seriously in the hole.

Ease the pain.

What to do, what to do? It was now November 2006. I had been involved in some capacity in the financial markets for 14 years. Fundamentally, I knew that I was at a crisis point. I had two options as far as I could see: carry on as I am now, dig myself out of this hole, and basically start over. Or I could do something else.

I went through several meetings with my boss. We exchanged a lot of emails. I told him I wasn’t happy, and hadn’t been for some time. I explained to him how my situation and responsibilities at home made it very difficult for me at work. I told him that while I knew I could trade myself back into profitability, I’m not sure I could afford to. Remember, I wasn’t earning any kind of wage. When your account is at zero (or, in my case, worse), there’s nothing to draw from. You have absolutely no income.

In an unprecedented act of generosity, my boss spoke to his boss and they offered to pay me a monthly wage to stay. They offered me better splits, more flexibility. Eventually they even offered me a position as the in-house technical analyst. Why? I’d been loyal. Where other traders had come and gone, complained and moaned, threatened this and that, I had stayed. And I’d made them a lot of money. You have to remember, all those desk fees, trading costs and splits added up for them, too. I don’t know the exact numbers, but over those past four years (2002-06), I’d made Tradex a pretty tidy sum, possibly as much as the mid six-figures.

But as we had these meetings, and emailed, and talked, I began to realise something. I didn’t want to do this anymore. It wasn’t the money, it wasn’t the job, and it wasn’t the bad run of form. I was confident I could make that back if I just put my mind to it. The thing was, I realised that I didn’t want to. That wasn’t going to make me happy. I had nothing to prove.

And so I quit.

Looking back now, it was a pretty monumental decision. Not only did I quit my position with the firm, but I quit my life in finance, too.

What now, genius?

I had no idea. I’d like to say quitting my job was some kind of masterplan, that I then sailed around the world, invented a cure for cancer or at least set a new world-record on Donkey Kong. But I didn’t.

Instead, I looked for work. Looking for a job is hard enough as it is without approaching it with no idea of what you actually want to do. I didn’t then, and I don’t now (hence this entire website). I had some rough idea that one of the things I’d like to replicate from my previous job in the City was the thrill. The rush that came from panic and success. The tension that filled your very being when things started to mount up against you. I felt that, for some reason, I’d miss that. It made the job interesting. What kind of job could I do that, on a daily basis, would afford me those same opportunities?

And then it came to me: I’d become a bouncer.

Now, this is not as left-field as it sounds. Alright, it is. But there’s a certain method in my madness. Bouncers, aka doormen, aka door supervisors (which is the industry’s preferred term, thank you very much), deal with risk on a daily basis. A different kind of risk, sure - when you’re losing money, it’s unlikely somebody is going to punch you in the face (unless it’s really bad) - but to some extent risk is risk.

And despite appearances, not all door supervisors are created equal. The industry has changed. Regulation has meant that the days of doors being exclusively worked by cauliflower-eared, mono-syllabic Neanderthals who start more fights than they stop are (almost) gone. The psychology of the job has become as important as the physical. It’s a fact that most fights are stopped before they ever start. That takes a certain level of skill. Even intellect. It’s very much a mind game. My attitude influences your attitude, which influences your behaviour, which influences my attitude. And so on.

As the great Dalton wisely observed in Road House (1989), “Be nice. Until it’s time to stop being nice.”

So I got my license.

This was March 2007. I worked the doors at an insanely busy holiday park nightclub for six months. Man, some of the stories I could tell you. There’s nothing as fickle as folk.

In September of 2007, I was offered a far more lucrative position in privacy security work, which I took. This is where I am now. I work shifts, 3-4 days per week, for 11 hours at a time. The money is okay, and the job itself isn’t too bad at all, but it isn’t who I am.

This, I’ve realised, while certainly not being a unique observation, is very much a big deal.

There’s a chance if you read the above (and if you read it all, then congratulations) that it may appear that one thing I don’t do is stick with something, certainly anything career-related. Or that I get out when the going gets hard. There’s an element of the former always running through my life, but the latter is not true. If you consider that I only started working properly in 1992, I’ve really only had five jobs in 16 years. And I stayed within the same industry for nearly 15 of them. I gave everything a fair shot.

My problem - and it is a problem - is that I’ve now reached a point where I literally do not know where to turn next. I’ve learned an enormous amount from the security business. Certainly about myself, how I deal with confrontation and how to diffuse potentially hazardous situations. But is this something I want for the rest of my life?

No.

Two popular observations:

1. Don’t dwell on the past
2. The past is a great predictor of the future

I’m a big believer in #2 - in fact, most of my career was built around that very principle.

And while you shouldn’t dwell on the past, you can’t do anything with #2 if you don’t at least analyse it a bit. Which reminds me:

Analysis is paralysis

And it is. But, again, how can we learn and grow if we don’t realise - and admit - our mistakes?

Here are a few of mine:

Fifteen years ago I received a Christmas bonus of $8,000. I had been in that job for three months.

Ten years ago I was making more than twice what I’m earning now.

Eight years ago I was the director of a company I part-owned, with five employees.

Four years ago I made $16,000 in one trade in less than ten minutes.

Two years ago I lost a small fortune over a two-month period and was completely wiped out.

Today, I am riddled with debt. I owe money to everybody, including the government. I’ve never held on to any amount of money for more than a few weeks. I have zero savings.

I suffer frequent mood swings. I go through phases of mania and phases of isolated depression.

I’m obsessed with something one week, and then want nothing to do with it the next.

I’ll go to the gym six days a week for three months, then stop going completely for two.

I have three wonderful children and I’m married to an amazing - and long-suffering - woman.

I have great friends. My relationship with my parents is solid.

My problem is me.

This realisation has hit me hard this year. This isn’t a rut. This isn’t something that be solved with a quick fix, or a life hack. This is going to take a lot of work.

I figured that the easiest thing to do is to try to break it all down. I thought about the things I wanted from life, as well as the things I felt would improve me as a person - as an individual - and this was the list I came up with:

1. Eat Well
2. Get In Shape
3. Get An Education
4. Find My Dream Job
5. See The World
6. Find Inner Peace
7. Give Back

Seven things. Seven things I felt were necessary to accomplish one broader goal: to live well.

One step at a time.

So… now what?

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