It was in 1994 when I was sitting in my first capital markets class in college and the professor introduced the concept of short selling securities that I fell in love with financial markets. Upon graduation, I moved to NYC and have been living in Manhattan since 1997. I started off in retail brokerage and then worked my way onto a boutique institutional equity sales and trading desk where I and the firm became casualties of the original tech bubble and the bear market of 2002. I then recreated myself into the fixed income and derivatives world where I  did hard labor at a major bank throughout the entire financial crisis and am now fighting algos on the S&P 500 e-mini screens. All this experience has taught me many lessons about myself, people and markets. My biggest take away is that when it comes to economics, commodities, interest rates, and corporate securities no one knows for sure what is going to happen. If they do, they’re cheating as we’ve come to find out in the wake of the crisis. When it comes to investing, my philosophy is to listen, ask questions, do my own homework, ask myself “does this make sense?” and then form my own opinion as to what I think is going to happen. The rest is up to our old friend luck.