Mutual Fund Solutions
Now days, like a junkie come clean, you must avoid the price tables in the newspaper and keep the money parked safely in mutual funds. Still, trading imbued me with a zero-sum outlook on life - that is, someone else's gain was my loss - and that outlook has been slow to fade. So when the currency converter chart news spread from the third section of the Wall Street Journal to the front page of the Chicago Sun-Times, he began to fear that the dollar's drop would cost him. This specter peaked in June when the van der Meers, the Dutch family of our au pair, encamped in our apartment for two weeks.
Their pleasure with the bargain prices in our stores, shock at the low cost of our home, and wonder that computers in America were almost free left me feeling pauperized, ashamed that the cash value of what he had would buy so little in their small village of tulip farmers. Just as when you are a floor trader, he felt their good fortune reflected badly on mine. He didn't like the idea of the van der Meers, or Muellers or Matsumotos for that matter, getting rich at his expense, and he began to wonder who and what were behind the drubbing my money was taking and whether my government could do anything to reverse it.
Chicago, his hometown, makes the evening business reports less often than other world financial centers, but the city is just as connected to the world markets. In 2006, for example, the dollar value of all trading on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange will exceed $ 200 trillion - eighty times the total sum traded on the New York Stock Exchange and six times the aggregate of all the world's gross national products. Each day, $ 800 billion changes hands. You wouldn't need a big piece of that to make a living - a half a millionth of a percent ($ 1 million a year) would do nicely.
At the Merc, as the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is known, he found Clifford Besser, a trader in the German mark futures pit. He met me in his trading jacket, the loose-fitting smock floor traders wear so that others on the floor can easily identify them. He had just realized a $ 200 loss and was glad. He feels good when he take a small loss. It proves to you that you can do what's necessary to avoid a big loss. Walking through the Merc, which is housed in two tall towers overlooking the concrete banks of the Chicago River, one feels like the ball in a high-tech pinball machine? On the two football-field-sized trading floors one can see traders crowded into the stepped pits, shouting, running, gesturing madly. In this double-speed world, no one sits. Eight stories of narrow escalators move a constant rush of traders, brokers, and clerks, all in colored jackets, which push their way up and down like confetti in an air chute. Trucks hawking burritos, pizza, and Chicken Park illegally outside. Customers tear into their bags as they rush back to the trading floor. Besser said he had a few minutes for lunch since the London markets had just closed and the rest were slow. We stopped at what passes for his office, a two-foot-high locker he rents from the exchange. It holds his work tools: cards to record his trades on, pens and pencils, and a $ 5 pocket calculator.
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