The memoir of an ex-investment manager Part 2

<Foreword>

I am very thankful for all the positive support I received in this blog. I will continue to work hard to ensure quality posts on this blog

I will also like to take the moment to thanks my sponsors: BMJC98, Carisdaneym2 and MizLhaine. This meant a lot for me as a new blog.

This is the second part of my memoir.

You can find the first part of my memoir below:

The memoir of an ex-investment manager Series:

Part 1: https://read.cash/@Edwardcloud/the-memoir-of-an-ex-investment-manager-part-1-f8d05d42

The Decisive Interview

Richard looked up and saw me. He came to me and give me a handshake. I cannot remember the actual conversations but it was something along the time during the interview, Richard and the managing director felt that while I am trained to be a risk manager, I was a better fit as an investment manager which they still have a position.

There was this line from Richard that struck my mind which very much later I realized that this is the quote from Richard Branson, "Look Edward when you have a chance to deal with a good opportunity, you say yes and you learn how to do it later."

By the time, I was out of Richard's office, I had a new job in the field of finance. I left the field of risk management into the field of investment.

The Investment Team

The investment company had a team of 7 trading desks with Richard as the chief investment officer. The investment team had a start-up capital of USD 50 million but Richard had managed to grow the portfolio into a couple of hundred million over the decades.

With 7 experienced investment managers with some in the company for decades, they need new blood to be a part of their renewal strategy. Richard had done a couple of interviews for the past few months, none of them are fitting to his requirements till I had come on board for the role of risk manager.

These 7 investment managers were trading around the clock from Monday to Friday coverage from the Japan Market to US Market. Unless there are any major holidays, we were expected to work even if it was a holiday in our country. Each manager was a specialist in the market specialize in a region and instrument. So these managers had worked in a different time zone. There were few and rare occasions where we can find the team ever come together.

They were to serve as my mentors. Because of the fact that they were to be my mentors, it meant that I will be put into shift mode at least during the initial training. I could still shiver when I remember the days of my training.

They were nickname by me as the 7 freaks. From the start of the training, I had been lectured by them almost every day. The experience was a daunting one. Do not get me wrong, they were not monsters or nasty. If you met them out of the trading office, they were some of the friendliest people around.

I was at a loss at one point when I was been lectured again. Not that I was making losses but I took the profit too early. The only lady in the 7 Freaks seems to see that I was losing confidence told me one day in the pantry during a lunch break that not to take the lectures to heart as this was the way that they had been trained and training people. The reason why they were so successful was because of the grilling that they had.

Under the 7 freaks, they had shown me the way to investment and trading. (Only 20% of their capital was stuck with investment while the remaining 80% went into trading. 20% of the profit made was been invested while the rest of the 80% were been used to fund the operation of the company, bonuses for the non-trading staff, trading commission, and profit-sharing for the investment manager.)

During my trainee days, I had to propose the instrument, product, entry price, take profit and cut loss price with the rationale why I should make the trade. Only through the mentors' approval, I could make execute the trade and square the trade based on the proposal. This lasted for six months. I had nearly 12 to 14 hours of trading sessions in each working day. In the last two months, they decided that they were sick of babysitting me and allocated five million dollars to execute the trading and another million to execute the investment component.

A couple of days after the six months stint, Richard called me into his office again. He was staring straight at my eyes hard without speaking for a long time. I felt that I was facing a tiger and was trying to shift my sight away from him. In my mind, I was thinking, I was doomed. Despite making a profit on my trading and investment, my results could not compare to the others. My six-month stint as an investment manager was going to end soon

<To be continued>

<Picture credits from Unsplashed>