The Part-Time Trader (15 page)

His response will drive much of what you are able to do at your own workstation. If the response ends up sounding something like: “We monitor everyone's Internet activity, and if the user surpasses 25 percent of personal time on the Internet, he will be flagged and dismissed from his responsibilities.” If you get a response like that, then you know that you have some actionable evidence about how to manage your time online in relationship to trading.

You may also be surprised by what he says if he responds with something like:

We really do not monitor what people do. We'll check for spikes in bandwidth relative to other users or average usage in general, but unless we have suspicion we are not going to dive into the personal usage of an employee on the Internet. We just do not have the resources to do that.

If that is the case, you now know that as long as you keep your trading private and your performance on the job where you continue meeting expectations, you will be good to go.

There is a lot of technology out there for companies to utilize when it comes to anything and everything that you do on your computer. One of the more popular features is the keystroke function. There are plenty of software companies that provide this kind of technology, but essentially what this does is record every time you press a key on the keyboard.

For instance, have you ever had an e-mail that you wanted to fire off at the boss man that really showed how you felt about him and how he ran the operation? It felt good to type out the e-mail that insulted him in every known way. But, of course, you backspaced out the e-mail and removed all of the derogatory text. Guess what! That entire “wishful” e-mail was recorded in the company's keystroke archives, and if they ever needed to build a case against you for having you fired, that evidence would be there for the their use, even though you never saved anything or actually acted on what you really would have liked to say to him.

I remember one time sitting in my cubicle on the Wednesday before the Thanksgiving break. It could be somewhat of a ghost town in the office since everyone was just waiting around to get the long holiday weekend started. Essentially, everyone that came in that day would wait until after lunch and then see whether the coast was clear to sneak out without being noticed. It was a domino effect, with the starting piece being the boss man. Once he left, the people remaining would just start peeling off one by one. It was one of those unaccepted and unwritten rules that everyone denied doing but, when no one was looking, they all would engage in.

On one particular occasion I was sitting at my cubicle with my head on a swivel planning my getaway. The boss man had left, and of course he had some reason to be excited as well. He was on his way to being promoted to a vice president position in the company. Just as I was getting out of my chair ready to hit the road without being caught in the act, a friend of mine, who we called “Batman” for reasons unbeknownst to me (though he was quite the eccentric of character types), came running into my office gasping for air. He had just run full-throttle across the cubicle farm and into my little space.

He handed me a single sheet of paper—a printout of an e-mail he had typed up. It was about his immediate boss, the one who was about to be promoted to vice president. The letter was scathing, one of the boldest e-mails I had ever read. I swelled with pride for this man who embodied everything that I would have liked to say about this incompetent manager who was wreaking havoc on our careers with his inept ways of management. The best part was that he intended to send this to the company president that was looking to promote him.

My first response was very basic: “You definitely let him know how you feel about the promotion of Jim [our boss].”

The problem, though, was not in the subject or body of the e-mail, but the fact that he had actually sent the e-mail, by accident, to the person he was seeking to vilify. Yes, he was sending it to Jim.

This is where you enter crisis mode. I was going to do anything and everything I could for this man to keep him from being ruined from this one moment of horrible oversight. The good thing, as mentioned earlier, was that the boss man had already hit the town for Thanksgiving, so the chance he had read the e-mail, by our deduction, was slim to none. My first thought was to call Greenwood in IT and ask him to delete the e-mail. Unfortunately, he either was not going to touch that ticking time bomb or he was really telling me the truth when he said there was nothing that he could do about it.

Now that I was willing to go to this extent, the whole thing was becoming a bit of an out-of-body experience. I felt like I was on a mission for the greater good. So we made our move inside the boss man's office. Once in there, though, we were immediately confronted with the cold reality of the computer appearing as if it had been shut down.

Our hope was that since he had only left 20 minutes earlier, the computer might still be accessible and that the monitor was only in power-down mode. Unfortunately, it was not. We were locked out. Username and password were required.

We were not done, though, because there was Plan C. (In hindsight, this probably should have actually have been Plan B). That was to simply recall the e-mail—a feature that is highly iffy when it comes to actually working. If the e-mail had been read, there was no way it would be recalled. First round of recall . . . nothing. Second try . . . nothing. Third attempt . . . nothing. For posterity's sake, we made a total of 10 recall attempts, all for nothing.

Maybe we were doing something wrong. So we tried it out on ourselves by sending and recalling an e-mail. We managed to successfully recall the e-mail when it had not been read but were met with failure when the e-mail was opened prior to the recall attempt.

The best (or, in the case of Batman, the worst) part of it all was that we discovered that each time you try to recall a message after it has already been read, it actually notifies the illegitimate recipient that you are trying to recall the message from them. That means an additional 10 e-mails were sent to this guy asking for the e-mail back!

To say the least, Batman probably had the longest Thanksgiving weekend of his life, but for all the wrong reasons. When Monday rolled around, he gingerly stepped back into the cube farm, waiting for his fate. When Jim called him into his office, the infamous and awkward stare-down between boss man and employee took place, with the former rocking back in forth in his plush leather chair.

“You're an idiot!”

“Excuse me?” replied Batman.

“Seriously . . . how could you be that big of an idiot? How? You sent me the e-mail! What were you thinking?!”

And Batman's time employed ended with a subtle but honest reply: “At least you know how I feel now.”

The point of this all is to realize that you have to be very, very cautious about the technology that you are using. You might not ever be confronted with the kind of problem I have just talked about. However, it is a microcosm of the slipups you can have with technology. I had many of them, and much of what I talk about in this book comes from my own mistakes as a worker and part-time trader.

What you always have to do is err on the side of caution. Do not do anything that will get you noticed or figured out. You are trying to trade, not cure the ills of Corporate America (and just for clarification, capitalism is by far the best kind of economic system you can have). Do not cloud your objective by setting yourself as some Don Quixote. You mission is to stay at your current job long enough, whether it be months or years, so that you can transition successfully from the world of part-time trading to that of the full-time trader.

Once you get familiar with the corporate policies toward Internet usage and after you know firsthand from those inside the IT organization how they operate, it will be necessary to modify your trading strategy as necessary.

Consider reading the corporate manual. Yes, that blasted booklet that outlines the impersonal nature of corporate policies. There is a 99.9 percent chance that there will be a whole section carved out and dedicated to Internet usage and how you may use your computer in such a way that does not lead to your immediate dismissal.

Here's the thing—if your corporate policies state that they have a zero-tolerance policy for personal Internet use that will lead to an immediate reprimand or firing, then that is probably a good indication that you should avoid using the Internet for trading, and instead rely more heavily on handheld technology like smartphones and tablets. Just make sure that if you use a tablet, you are not connecting to the company's Wi-Fi. Instead, you will want to make sure that you have a cellular plan dedicated to accessing the Internet. With speeds like 4G LTE that most companies now offer, the mobile experience of using cell towers is very comparable to many Wi-Fi networks.

When a company says they “reserve the right to do so” in their policies, it usually means “Do not give us a reason to monitor your every move.” Therefore, you probably have more flexibility when it comes to accessing your online brokerage than what they want you to believe.

Another quick tidbit that most people do not even realize they are doing sometimes but nonetheless they expose themselves to: it can be quite risky when saving files or installing programs to the company network's servers. Typically, there are two places that you can save documents to: the first is your hard drive on your computer. The second is the server space that companies give each employee to save their files to. Most companies want you to save your files to the space allocated to you on their servers because they are usually backed up, if not daily, at least weekly, and in case you leave the company on bad terms, they do not lose any files you might have tried to delete prior to your exit.

To say the least, I was against having any of my personal stuff (and I tried to limit anything personal) on the server, because once they made it through one backup cycle, they were there for all eternity. You do not get it back, and it is there for the boss man's taking should he want it. You could say I suffered from paranoia, but I also realized it was that paranoia that kept me from doing something incredibly stupid (not really, but I at least thought so). I was paranoid to such an extent that I figured they had some software I wasn't aware of that probably backed up the files on my computer as well. As a result, each night when I left the office, if I left my computer (when I had a laptop) in the office, I would unplug the network cable that connected to my computer to prevent any remote access to my computer.

Also, because I kept my working files on my computer (I would upload them to the server only if I had to or if I was required to for others to use), I would access the guest connection and not the internal network that required you to log on with password and username.

Most companies will have a protected network access and a guest access that does not require you to log on with your “identifying credentials.” This is great because if you do not have to log on, you will not be tracked outside of that pesky IP address, but it is much more difficult to prove the user behind the computer by matching IP addresses, particularly since you did not use a username and password to access the internet.

To add to the Internet usage aspect, do not—and I mean do not—access your company's Wi-Fi through your smartphone or tablet. Once you do that, any activity you on your own smartphone is deemed the same as doing it on your company-issued workstation.

I used to always have people trying to find out what my cell phone number was so that if I was not in my office, away at a meeting, in another office, or at the beach playing on a “sick day,” they would be able to reach me. Let's just say, if they call you when you are at the latter, it is hard to cover up your whereabouts when they can hear the seagulls squawking in the background.

I was on vacation once (literally), and on the slopes of some of Salt Lake City's finest mountain peaks getting ready to go down some of the best courses the world has to offer. Right before I began the descent down, my cell phone rang. I did not know who it was, but out of curiosity I answered it anyway.

“Ryan Mallory! This is Edward. Listen, you wouldn't mind taking a moment to explain to me about the competitive consumer price analysis you did on that contract you finalized right before leaving for vacation, would you?”

CLICK!

Another phone call later on . . .

“Hey, Ryan, Edward again. Listen, I know you are on vacation, but if I can just have 135 minutes of your time to explain exactly what went down during your negotiation session, I'd appreciate it.”

To say the least, I never gave out my phone number ever again. Good ole' Edward managed to get it from the secretary that promised to guard it with her very life and to not make it available unless I was in a state of cardiac arrest on the floor (even then, I wanted her to wait a few minutes before she made it available to anyone, just in case I snapped out of it).

After that vacation, I came back with a changed phone number. People who tried to call me tried relentlessly to access me at that number. The problem was that I was paying for that phone with the minutes the corporation was consuming on a daily basis. When the secretary asked me to update her on my new phone number, I gave her one that was a single digit off. It was none of her business. I came to work, and if they wanted to contact me, they could do so through more traditional means, like waiting for me to be back at the landline at my desk.