OPENING POSITION
October 1999
Who in the trading community cannot help reflecting on Mark Barton's slayings in Atlanta at a daytrading shop? The event evokes the darkest impulses we experience in our business: rage, fear, exultation, depression.
I've felt all of these emotions. I've broken desks, leaped into the air, screamed, thrown phones, even contemplated putting a hammer through a monitor. I've never reached for a revolver, but thank God it was never handy.
Sometimes, it would be wonderful to get into a fight at the trading desk, a rage to let out all the self-loathing and fear. We deal with a many-headed monster whose random actions are constantly taking us by surprise. We seek the market's rhythm, the herd's movement, like shoaling fish trying to escape the predator with our numbers, darting this way and that, now long, now short. Even if that group is mistaken, being with the group feels better than making a mistake on our own, where it can be so clearly identified. Ah, the self-abuse our mistakes set off. We assault ourselves! Is it such a step to assault others?
The premeditation of Barton's murders and suicide speaks to me, and every reader of STOCKS & COMMODITIES. First, Barton killed his family -- was it from his losses, his failure, his shame? Then he killed his fellow traders, some of whom lent him money to trade. Were they "those who sought my failure," as he wrote? Later, he killed himself, closing out his position. I wonder if, in killing the traders, he didn't again strike at those dear to him but who knew of his failure and had helped him. Those who have sat in trading rooms know the camaraderie, the sense of combat that forms there.
Daytrading fools you. You think, because you're on the tape second by second, you have more control over the situation. You think you can get out instantly, therefore you’re safer. In reality, all the emotions you'd otherwise have time to sort through and assess hit you full blast and the time in which to deal with them shrinks to almost nothing. The result is almost always bad, especially if your "shop" is pushing you for more trades and/or more profitability.
In this intensity, perhaps Barton identified too closely with being a trader rather than doing trading. Whether a trade goes good or bad doesn't make you a winner or a loser; it's whether you executed the trade -- entry, loss control, profit-taking -- properly that is your measure. If you say to yourself, "I am a trader," then success or failure in trading means you, your very being, is a success or failure. That’s too much to say. Instead, you should say, "I trade," and accept success or failure in that endeavor rather than put your whole life on the line -- not to mention the lives of others, as Barton did -- in trading.
Keep some distance, and stay healthy.
Good Fortune!
John Sweeney,
Technical Editor
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