The Part-Time Trader (7 page)

They will be elated with the kind words and wonder what their boss is thinking when he reads it. Remember, it is key that you blind copy them on the e-mail because when they see with their own eyes what you actually wrote, they will be primed and ready for you take the next step.

Once you have your coworker's peer review out of the way, you then proceed to send them a review request for yourself. Unless they are some kind of ruthless barbarian (and you would know it if they were), they will gladly accept this, as they are still riding on cloud nine from what you said about them, and will write a glowing review about you as well.

Maybe it won't be as over the top as the one you did for them, but they definitely are not going to throw you under the bus. And out of a need for reciprocity and “corporate citizenship,” they are likely to blind copy you on the review they send to your boss as well. It is that whole “You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours” mentality.”

Seven years after having won the employee-of-the-year award, I was still finding ways to incorporate the fact that I got the award in nearly every one of my yearly reviews. When it came to the section entitled “Accomplishments,” I always would refer to that one glorious day in my corporate career that, for a moment in time, made me think I was one of them—no, no, better than the rest of them, as if I could dominate the industry and become some kind of tycoon in the process. Unfortunately, that feeling lasted for only about 48 hours. After the curtains had dropped and the pageantry subsided, I realized I was left with just a useless crystal paperweight that measured about 1/35 the size of the Eiffel Tower.

Even more telling was the fact that when I came into work the following Monday, I thought somehow I would receive a hero's parade of some kind. Not a chance. Most were disgruntled that I had won such an award and had done so less than a year into the job—for good reasons, too, though it might have felt good at the time. There is no doubt that the award itself was nice, and so was the bonus I received, but it was all pointless in its ultimate meaning and the false sense of hope that it could give someone.

Not for employee year-end reviews, though. And had I stayed there for 25 more years, I would have probably still been using that one solitary award as part of my yearly review.

When doing these self-reviews, for the most unknown and idiotic of reasons, they ask the employee to identify areas of improvement and areas of weakness. I'm sure if every employee were honest, it would look something like this:

• I take an hour lunch instead of a half-hour.
  
• Find ways to come in on time and not 30 minutes late, and getting away with it by sneaking in through the back door.
  
• Spend less time surfing the Web and more time actually doing the work assigned to me.
  
• Balance the use of time on Facebook and Pinterest on my smartphone, which the boss cannot monitor, and become a more productive employee in the workplace.
  
• The first 45 minutes could be better used answering e-mail received overnight than by spending it in the break room making my morning cup of coffee, microwaving my pastry, filling up my water bottle, and talking over the water cooler about last night's reality talent show.
  
• Avoid becoming immersed in the latest corporate action rumor taking place as if I actually have a role in it or will in any way benefit from it.
  
• Avoid spreading false layoff rumors just to see others get worked up into a tizzy.
  

If what we really thought could actually somehow have positive effects on our career, then this particular section on our reviews would be helpful. But it is not. So do what every Edward and Debbie in the workplace does and embellish your strengths through your weaknesses.

Personally, I demonstrated my strengths by answering the corny “weakness” questions as “Not Applicable to Employee” or “None to Date” or my favorite: “To Be Determined.” I am sure that the boss man didn't appreciate my borderline narcissistic personality that came through on my reviews, but most bosses do not care enough about it to ask you to revise it after they submit it, because it requires them to wait yet again for the changes to be made and the effort and the confrontation of asking for it to be changed.

The response might not have improved my standing in the short term, but at least I didn't have to give legitimate areas for improvement only for it to be held against me in the future through my own admission.

So you may not like my own personal approach to the no-win questions found on reviews, but whatever you decide, do not be honest about your weaknesses. That's what the “Garys” and “Larrys” of the workplace do, and it leads them to a life of being stepped on and always being nothing more than the tools of the “Edwards” and “Debbies.”

Because the reviews that nearly all companies undergo are pointless in nature, the boss man finds ways to make the process easier by finding as many ways as possible to not exert strain on a single brain cell when the reviews submitted have to actually be, well, “reviewed.”

By doing so they create what the corporate world likes to call “process improvements.” It's the corporate code word for “laziness.” By the time my last year on the job rolled around, they had most of our questions categorized into a system that functioned at the kindergarten level. If you performed at a high level, you received a “green” rating. If performance was just average, you were “yellow,” and the employee who was ready to be thrown on the ash heap of corporate unemployment received the “red” rating.

Then it was determined that so many individuals were being ranked as a “green,'' a committee board decided after a long-drawn out internal review that another color had to be added. For the exception—that is, your name is “Edward” or “Debbie”—you received the magical “blue” annotated for the questions and overall review. On my own personal reviews, of course, I gave myself a “blue” for every category, question, and overall rating as well.

It's essential that you always do, at the least, enough to keep your job, and I encourage everyone to make sure they are doing the best work they possibly can. But, in the end, you cannot serve two masters. If you want to be a successful trader, you will have to decide how much less successful you'll want to be in your corporate jobs.

When I went on trips with others, and at night when everyone went downstairs to drink and be merry, it would have been nice to join them. I could have gotten in good with not only the boss man but also the boss man of the boss man. So you would think I would be motivated to mingle with these folks, but I did not. I was a recluse. I stayed in my hotel room, flipped on the television to whatever was on for some background noise, and plugged away on my research and other trading activities that were required of me to ensure that I could continue successfully in my ultimate goal of leaving the corporate stratosphere for full-time trading.

Making the transition from part-time trader to full-time trader requires significant choices and sacrifices along the way. In some ways it will feel like you are doing a kamikaze on your future growth as an employee, but ultimately that is not what you want here anyway. If you get promoted along the way, that is great as well and nothing to feel guilty about. However, do not expect the corporate world to still endear themselves to you when you no longer accept them as your first love (though they should still be your first responsibility).

Done with your responsibilities for the day, week, or month? That is great! The normal tendency is to go to the boss man and let him know that you do not have any more work to do and he should give you more assignments to complete.

But I would not do that.

I would let those assignments come to me. Often when you are done with your work and you go to your boss asking for more, he or she may find it appropriate to call on one of your busier colleagues like Edward, Debbie, Gary, or Larry, who live their lives biting off more than they can possibly chew, and shovel off some of their workload onto you. In the corporate world, this is tagged with the fancy label of
offloading.

That's fine if you work in a vacuum, but what happens when your other job responsibilities pick up and you have to take care of those assignments as well as the ones that were offloaded on you. Essentially, you'll have a far greater workload that will inevitably get in the way of your trading, and if it does not, you will become known to the boss man through others complaining about your work performance because you were unable to get their work done for them.

Remember, the best thing as a trader is to be all caught up on your work. It is the perfect scenario. How can your boss get mad at you for doing your job? This is where you are much better able to place a greater focus on your trading endeavors without having to worry about compromising your work performance in the process.

There were a few times where I was promoted while I was in Corporate America. There were only so many people that could get promoted each year. In fact, it was so crazy that they would rank their employees. Only the top employees from each department were promoted. But if you were getting promoted too quickly, then you would get knocked down lower because they did not want you to get too many promotions in too short a time period.

Let's say there were three promotional spots for a given fiscal year, but there were five people who worked hard enough to deserve being promoted. They would have to decide which three out of the five would receive the promotion, and the Edwards and Debbies would debate over who would receive the promotion, where only the three favorites would actually realize what they deserved.

The problem with this mentality is that it creates some stiff competition 365 days out of the year among employees. Despite the organization's being so hell-bent on teamwork, they manufactured a corporate jousting arena for employees to prioritize their time by trying to knock the other off their horse as many times as possible so that come promotion time, they would be the ones getting a higher level tagged to their job title when promoted. Immersing myself in that mindset and environment just never carried much appeal to me.

This corporate mentality isn't unique to where I came from; instead, it is quite prevalent among large companies. It has its roots in one of today's biggest industry tycoons, who reshaped the workplace during his tenure as chief executive officer (CEO) of one of America's largest corporations. Because of his apparent success in managing people, zealous CEOs across the country decided they needed to foster a similar environment to the one I have described so far.

I realized that unless I laid my trading habits aside, there was no way I was going to be able to compete with these people by simply working an eight-hour shift each day. The folks who got promoted would volunteer for the hard assignments, work the long hours, and then brown-nose any individual that was one or more levels higher than they were. If you were their equal, then beware—you were not even safe in their presence with a plastic knife lying around.

Just when they would all get promoted and I would think I was next in line for the promotion and the raise that comes with it, a whole new flock of employees who had been promoted from below me to my current level would be willing to make the same sacrifice all the other employees that went on before me were willing to make.

There's no doubt that I could have competed with them—remember, I
was
employee of the year and that once “rising star” that quickly fell from the heavens. However, had I chosen to enter into the rat race with everyone else to try and be the next Edward, it is unlikely I would have ever found my way into full-time trading.

With that decision came family pressures as well. If you are the breadwinner of the family like I was, coming home and telling your spouse that you are only going to do what is expected and not go above and beyond for your employer (i.e., marrying yourself to the job as well) will undeniably cause stress in your relationship, and you certainly do not want to do that.

I also want to make sure that you don't take me wrong and think that you should slack off on your job, not take it seriously, and be willing to risk getting fired as a result, because that is definitely not what I am saying here. I am simply stating that you have to put your job in the category of a temporary solution to a long-term fix.

Ultimately, you want to be a trader. But in order to trade and get better at doing so, you need a stream of income because numerous mistakes in trading will be made along the way, as well as the simple fact that if you are still working, you have not earned enough income to be that full-time trader. It is a delicate balance—if it weren't, I would not be writing this book. I tried many different approaches to my job. Some worked very well and others not so much. My task over the next 12 chapters is to dig in deep on each of these topics for your benefit—both failures and successes.

You job is important and, above all else, you have to keep it. While the desire is to eventually migrate into trading full-time, you have to treat your job as a component of your trading. No job means you will have no trading career. When you ultimately make that switch to full-time trading, you have to do so in such a way that you are not putting an undue burden on yourself and also your family in order to succeed.

The worst type of trader is the one who has to make a certain dollar amount each month (or else) to pay the bills, feed the family, and pay the tuition. When that happens, everything goes down the drain. Marriage suffers, emotions are strained, money is absent, and success in trading and thereby bigger profits than before becomes a near impossible task at which few can succeed.