Introducing the Market

I had the fortune to start my trading career in 1987 — more exactly, on 19 October, the day the market crashed.1 The bank had hired me in September after my graduation from engineering school, but 19 October was the first day I had set foot on the floor, owing to my boss’s intuition that there would be something worth watching and learning in there that day. I remember a distinct feeling which I would later recognize as philosophically-charged and which spontaneously imposed itself on me as I stood by the pit and watched the fast trading activity. (I couldn’t trade myself as I was still an apprentice — I could only watch.) Simply, I became convinced that there was more going on, in producing the events and their succession, than the mere chain of causes and effects that unfolded in chronological time.