Aug 27, 2008

Waiting.. waiting for godot


Yup! always waiting for something that never materialises.. 
They are not dreams, you can't write a little letter to father Xmas to send things to you also because father Xmas only comes down chimneys and I only have a stupid fig tree
yes yes I know.. you can make things happens.

I know you couldn't care less. I know you will always remain of your opinion, I know you think I'm wrong and blablabla.. 

Birth? Coincidence? Luck...
X grew up in Raleigh, North Carolina, and counts among his ancestors, a rogue colonist who, in 1676, launched an unauthorized attack on Indians that briefly led to his controlling most of Virginia. His father, ran the North Carolina real estate operations of both Prudential and later Merrill Lynch & Co. When his father eventually remarried, it was to the sister of a man who was fast becoming a Wall Street legend: Julian Robertson.
He is the middle of three sons. His brothers,  graduated from local public schools, he, in his junior year, ventured out of town enrolling in preppy Episcopal High School, by coincidence Robertson's alma mater. Students at Episcopal were expected to work hard and had to sit in study hall during free periods and evenings. Only in the afternoon did they get a few hours outdoors, to play football or other sports. He didn't seem to mind. One afternoon I passed through study hall, and there was him, grinding away, recalls Lee Ainslie Jr., the former Episcopal headmaster and father of Lee Ainslie III, manager of the $4.5 billion Maverick Capital hedge funds. Most other boys would have been happy to be outdoors playing.

An aficionado of Ernest Hemingway and Nathaniel Hawthorne, he cultivated his love of the outdoors in the bucolic surroundings of Vermont. Southerners at Middlebury stuck out like sore thumbs, recalls classmate Christopher Brady, who heads money management and advisory firm Chart Group and is the son of former Treasury secretary Nicholas Brady. He hunted a lot, skiied incessantly and studied.
Still, there were some early signs of the future financier: During the summers following his sophomore and junior years, He worked as a clerk for New York Stock Exchange specialist Walter N. Frank & Co. and met Frank after working on his deep-sea charter fishing boat off Montauk, Long Island, during the summer of 1976.
An early influence was Paul Tudor Jones, who was sharing an apartment with Charles Johnson, a former roommate of Zack Bacon's at the University of North Carolina. Jones, who had started out as a cotton trader, was then working as a commodities broker with E.F. Hutton.
He soon headed off to get his MBA at Columbia University, where he used his student loan as capital to continue to trade. To his chagrin, he lost it all - and had to work odd jobs to make up the difference.
From this experience, he learned how to handle risk, he landed at Shearson Lehman Hutton in 1983 as a futures broker, trading on behalf of some of the biggest names in the hedge fund world. For a 27-year-old, he deployed a powerful Rolodex. Jones and brother Zack, who deployed landed at Soros Fund Management as head trader, threw plenty of business his way. He quickly became a top commission producer.
He was very fortunate to be right in the middle of that network, notes Charles Stockley, president of Stockley Asset Management, a futures trading firm, and a childhood friend of Jones's. You can't say that his career is a story of someone starting at the bottom and clawing his way up. But he took the ball and ran with it, and ultimately he surpassed them all.
His gilt-edged client list had another advantage, in addition to the hefty commissions: By trading on behalf of Soros and Jones, he learned their investing styles.
By 1986 he had acquired enough of a reputation to start managing other peoples' money. The following year, while still at Shearson, he set up a small fund . Right off he hit a home run. He correctly anticipated the stock market crash, going short S&P futures and then shifting to a long position just as the market bottomed.
By the end of the decade, he had established a strong track record, and he decided to move to a bigger stage
That first year, the fund was up 86 percent, thanks largely to his decision to short the Nikkei index just before the Japanese markets collapsed. He also anticipated Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait and went short stocks and long oil.
As he set out to raise more money, his task was made easier by his friendship with Jones, who had decided to close his funds to new money. In a letter to investors, Jones recommended they invest spare capital with him. Jones also introduced him to Busson, who had helped him raise money in Europe. 

The story is for me and it's not for you.. also because you get bored of reading things like this I omitted some pieces and some names.

It's not luck... it's not coincidence... yes you have to be great, but somebody has to give you a chance... 
Waiting to hear what's the excuse this time.. 

1 comment:

albeo said...

wonder which bits you omitted...
;-)