In pursuit of wisdom (yet never far from folly)

Just over two years ago (Happy Anniversary to me) I started my blogging ‘career’, with my first entry in the Layman’s Guide to International Relations. At that time I revealed some of the reasons for starting it up. I’ll try not to repeat myself all over again here, but I do want to share a few of the behind-the-scenes internal ruminations that went on in the months before I arrived in Kyrgyzstan in January 2009 to re-embark on an English teaching career that I thought had come to a merciful denouement in June 2008, after my stint in Riga.

I feel like I’ve sort of lost direction over the past few months and I’m hoping a name change, a new location and a sprucing-up of the layout will provide a much-needed boost to my waning inspiration.

In the beginning…

Not to invoke memories of the painful Soviet past, but teaching English was meant to be a ‘Two-Year Plan’ before commencing a more, uh, proper career. So much for that. When my dear friend Asif asked me just a couple of months ago, ‘is this your career now?’ I somewhat panicked and couldn’t bring myself to answer yes.

After a great year teaching in Lviv in my first gig (2005-6), I headed to the Basque Country, where things didn’t go according to plan. I didn’t want the two year project to end on such a sour note, so I opted to give it a go for a third year, and headed back east to the cosier confines of Riga. That was a far more enjoyable experience but when June 2008 rolled around, I was ready to call time on teaching.

After a holiday gallivanting around Crimea, Georgia and Armenia for a few weeks, I spent the remainder of the summer in Canterbury working at a summer school, spending quality time with my sister who was finishing up her Master’s and pondering the next potential steps. Though I’d often told myself that I always wanted to teach history in high school, I wasn’t anywhere near being 100% certain of that. No one is ever 100% of anything as far as careers go – in my opinion – but I feel like to get into a career as tough as education, you really have to be committed. This is something I learnt during my student teaching placement last spring in New Hampshire.

I then spent most of September and early October in Israel, where I and some of my nearest and dearest friends witnessed the nuptials of our pal Yonni in Tel Aviv, and then in Jordan where I was tortured by a runaway camel in the vast desert of Wadi Rum, scaled the ruins of Petra, wandered in and out of the souks of Amman, all whilst suffering from the effects of Ramadan. I did my best to observe the fasting regimen, and was quite proud of myself when it was all over. I bookended my peregrinations with a week in Jerusalem, an utterly mesmerising and unforgettable experience, one I’d like to recount on these very pages one of these days.

15 September, 2008: my birthday and the day Lehman Brothers collapsed – there’s relevance here

On this fateful day, I was sitting outside an Irish bar with Jeff and Murad, quaffing ale and reflecting on the previous hours spent meandering through old Jerusalem’s various quarters. (just re-reading a sentence like this re-affirms the feeling that I must be doing something right with my life)

Friends and faithful readers will be fully aware of how I like to follow the news and how irritable I can become if I don’t get time to read. During August, I was so busy with my summer school job, that I had little time to catch anything other than the main headlines every now and then. Though the financial crisis slowly began manifesting itself, I missed out on a lot of the details until the system and markets imploded in mid-September. Even while in Israel I don’t think any of us fully comprehended what had happened, with the ramifications only becoming fully clear once I’d returned to the US and was able to digest it all.

Not to sound too profound or hyperbolic here, but the financial crisis had a massive impact on my career direction as well. Might I be one of the lucky few to have benefited positively from those cataclysmic events?

Let’s go back a bit in time

I would never have the audacity to claim that I predicted any of this. Perhaps I should refrain from modesty, for once, and take more credit, but the trouble is I haven’t got too many witnesses. After all, stock talk and market jitters aren’t exactly thrilling topics of conversation for most people. If I had to make a list of certain conversation topics undertaken with an uninterested party that under no circumstances should extend for more than 30 seconds, it would look a bit like this:

1. Fantasy sports teams
2. The antics of a weird and eccentric friend that others have never met
3. Superfluous details of the bird you pulled the night before
4. Dreams
5. Details of one of those ‘you had to have been there’ stories
6. Babies
7. Wedding planning
8. Overly specific descriptions of something really cute that one of your students did in class that day (especially to non-teachers); general complaining about your students is a bit more acceptable, however
9. Your investment portfolio

I plead guilty to the first and last offences, though thank goodness I’ve long given up on playing fantasy sports. The last one is tricky. I love talking about investments, sharing tips, getting advice, but I’ve met so few people that I can do this with.

In Riga, Galen and I shared a few investment tips and talked about general financial events. In Latvia, some people were a bit uncertain about the shaky banking sector and the high public debt. I had a few chats with some of my business students, and most of them were optimistic, some I thought irrationally so. Or, ‘irrationally exuberant’, you could say, to quote Alan Greenspan.

I was far more sanguine.

From what I’d read in the Economist and FT, Latvia was in particularly bad shape. From the information I gleaned, I thought that if a crisis were to hit anytime soon, Latvia would be hit particularly hard, more than others. I shared this opinion with many of my students, and told them to get their money out of Latvian banks.

When the crisis did hit, Latvia got hit hard. Worse than most.

With Galen, I expressed my reservations about arcane financial instruments like collaterised debt obligations (CDOs) and the murky world of hedge funds. Something just didn’t seem right, like it was some grand pyramid scheme spiraling ever upwards. With the markets running at a rather frothy level, I just thought things were too good to last. Not that I thought a crash of such magnitude was in sight, but I definitely thought the markets were overheating and that it was all unsustainable. With that in mind, I had most of my money on the sidelines, which at the time wasn’t an easy thing to do as the markets moved up and up and up. In retrospect, I’m counting my lucky stars.

‘I’ve got some fairly heavy background in mathematics. But some of the complexities of some of the instruments that were going into CDOs bewilders me. I didn’t understand what they were doing or how they actually got the types of returns out of the mezzanines and the various tranches of the CDO that they did. And I figured if I didn’t understand it and I had access to a couple hundred PhDs, how the rest of the world is going to understand it sort of bewildered me.’ (Alan Greenspan)

And he isn’t alone. I wouldn’t purport to know a great deal about how markets work, but then no one else appears to either. I feel like I’ve got a halfway decent grasp of what’s going on though.

Last September I read Too Big to Fail (Andrew Ross Sorkin), an enthralling look at the behind-the-scenes action, all the financial jiggery-pokery, the cooking of books and various other hijinks that led to the downfall of some of Wall Street’s biggest banks. A waitress in one of my favourite cafes here noticed I was reading it and, in her limited English, asked me to explain what ‘fail’ meant. It was a futile endeavour, between my awful Russian and her not-so-good English.

But even then, I’m hard pressed to explain what really happened in the markets and whether it might all happen again.

What has all this got to do with anything?

When I returned to America in October 2008, seemingly done with this teaching lark, I began scouring websites for various jobs in big cities. After a few years in the cultural wilderness, I wanted to go somewhere bold and brash, somewhere where things were happening. What other place, then, than New York? Trouble was, I still had little idea what I wanted to do, even after a few stern talking-tos from my pals in Israel when they told me to stop being a whingeing little baby and to get my act together and just decide on something. As I told a few friends in the ensuing months, over excessively long, stream-of-consciousness style emails, I felt like I was applying for jobs in a sawn-off shotgun style manner. There was no rhyme or reason to what I was applying for: publishing, journalism, NGOs, university admin work, financial analysis…I had little idea what I wanted to do, I was just more concerned with working somewhere exciting.

In the wake of the crisis, my timing couldn’t have been worse. I got no bites. Even what few connections I had were of little help, though I did have a promising lead from a former college love-interest working in publishing who a couple of years after college graced the pages of Marie Claire to describe how her narcolepsy was badly affecting her sex life with her boyfriend. That made me feel a whole lot better, let me tell you. I’m 99.9% certain neither she nor anyone she knows will ever read this, so I’m not taking too many risks here.

Anyway…

In between looking for jobs, I was spending a lot more time playing the market. While people panicked, I smelt opportunity. The market plunged to new lows, and suddenly there was some easy money to be made. Normally stable companies were swinging 15-20% in a day and it became easy to make little bits here and there. I had very little experience in day-trading up till then, preferring to be more sensible and put my funds in more passive investment vehicles, like ETFs and mutual funds. Back when I worked at IBT, I day traded a single stock, Rambus, which I developed a love affair for. That stock alone made me enough to pay off my student loans every month, but that was a relationship that only lasted a couple of months before I decided to remain within the relatively safer and then more lucrative confines of college football gambling.

Because it didn’t seem healthy for a man my age to be spending too much time at home with my parents, I looked for a temporary, seasonal job. I applied for a few retail gigs and had some interviews before accepting a position with, gulp, Toys ‘R Us (there goes my street cred). I went with them on the basis of a recommendation of my sister. She had worked there in the run-up to Christmas a couple of year prior and had had a good enough time. My Toys ‘R Us career lasted a whopping 3 hours. That was all I could take. Three hours, twenty-four dollars. I’m not even sure whether I ever received a paycheck. I remember them saying after that initial 3-hour ‘trial period’ that I was to call them back after a few days, that they weren’t in the habit of calling people since they were so disorganised and busy. You’ve got to appreciate their honesty. Still, I was terrified they’d call me back and any time the phone rang, my mother would answer it, and jokingly say in a loud voice, ‘Oh, Toys ‘R Us? Yes, he’s here, he’s been waiting for your call, he’d be delighted to accept the position!’ It always got me into a frenzied state of agitation.

I thought to myself, why the hell should I spend 8 hours doing a crummy retail job when I can make that exact same amount online in 30 minutes?

And that’s where it all began. It became a full-time job for a couple of months. I’d get up early, turn on CNBC, do a bunch of research, and then spend the day in front of the computer. On some days I wouldn’t even get dressed or eat until after the market closed at 4pm. I subsisted on coffee. I still sent out CVs and covering letters to various jobs, but if I’m being honest, it was all a pretty half-assed effort.

Realising that I couldn’t do this forever, I started thinking of plans B, C and so on. I decided to finally go ahead and apply for history teaching certification programmes, applying to do a PGCE in Britain as well as the American equivalent in New Hampshire, which of course I ended up doing in September 2009.

So I had a gap to fill between January and September and I reckoned I might as well go teach somewhere abroad, yet again. There was no way I could sit and day trade for another 9 months, though had I done so, I probably could have made a killing. I left for Bishkek late January 2009, and it was March 2009 that the market hit its lows and where the great opportunities presented themselves (it’s obviously much easier to look at all this in retrospect). Being in Kyrgyzstan, with that ridiculous time difference and questionable internet café security, wasn’t exactly the most ideal setting for day-trading, especially when such activities were taking place at 3am local time. Luckily for me, I had Kole, a fellow teacher and stock market junkie, to keep me company on some nights.

Well before I got to Kyrgyzstan, friends were pressuring me into starting a blog. Up until then, I had only sent out the occasional group email with details of my exploits. You could say that starting up the Layman’s Guide was a response to my friend’s demands. One or two even encouraged me to go with a financial theme, sort of a Stock Markets 101 type of thing, but I’m not qualified for that. I do spend an inordinate amount of my time on market research, you absolutely have to if you want to stay abreast of developments and opportunities. It used to be that I’d turn on my computer and go straight for the football results or the news headlines. These days my first ports of call are Reuters, Seeking Alpha and Ameritrade. And as much time as I devote to this pursuit, and all the blogs I follow, I am somewhat tempted to sally forth and offer up my own two cents and my ‘hot picks’ for 2011. But I shall resist – if you badly want to know my tips for 2011 (and beyond), get in touch and I’ll let you know what I’m buying.

(okay, here are just two of my safer, less risky favourite picks for 2011: National Bank of Greece – NBG – which I bought at $1.60 a month ago and is hovering just over $2 and is nowhere near as risky as you may think; and Mindspeed Technologies - MSPD – which I got in early January at $6.30 and is now over $8; my more ‘speculative’ punts involve highly risky biopharmaceuticals that can either double on good news or plummet 70% on bad.)

With Funfare for the Common Man I’m looking for a fresh start. I can’t say there will definitely be any discernible difference between this and the Layman’s Guide, but I think a fresh approach might do me a bit of good. I was getting a bit jaded before, and spent too much time writing and re-writing my posts. My aim this time is to go for quick and dirty, with minimal re-editing and less concern about what I do and don’t say. Let’s face it after all: one does have to be careful in this day and age with what’s aired in public forums. On the one hand, I want to take risks, to share all sorts of details, not shy away from what I’m experiencing and what’s on my mind. But on the other hand, as those of you who received my ‘secret post’ via email will no doubt attest to, what I discussed there just couldn’t be aired in a public space. That goes without saying.

(and if you missed out on that email and are baffled as to what I’m talking about, get in touch and I’ll post that out to you.)

With all this blabbering about the financial crash and the months that ensued in my life, my point really is this: had all that not happened, had I been able to find a job in the US, then I very well wouldn’t be in Kyiv right now. Events would have taken an entirely different course (way to state the obvious about cause and effect, idiot). Who knows where I would be now. Kyrgyzstan was an unbelievable experience, Keene State and my teaching certification less so, but it all stems from feeling lost and directionless in the post-Israel period, realising that I could make enough money in the stock market to keep the student loan people happy as well as making enough to keep the retirement fund going, allowing me to happily teach English anywhere I want, safe in the knowledge that the measly salary – by Western standards – I get in Eastern Europe won’t get in the way of allowing me to enjoy life to the fullest and have a good time.

But there’s also a glaring contradiction amongst all this. Despite my frequent desire to want to talk about this with people, I also like to keep it somewhat of a secret. There’s no denying it keeps me terribly busy and does almost feel like a 2^nd, part-time, job at times. But in a masochistic way, it’s a thrilling, addictive hobby, as stressful and time-consuming as it can be. And it’s a part of what makes me, me. My nature is to be quite open and honest, but at the same time, I’m reluctant to share with people why I’m so busy or why I have to dash home before such-and-such an hour to trade before the markets close. Put it this way: it’s not necessarily something I’m eager to share as a hobby per se – on a par with reading, writing, cooking, etc – but it certainly is one, perhaps even the biggest.

‘Many things that I would not care to tell any individual man I tell to the public, and for knowledge of my most secret thoughts, I refer my most loyal friends to a bookseller’s stall.’ (Montaigne)

Life, uninterrupted

I hate to jinx anything, but life over the past few weeks has been quite remarkable, at times even unbelievable, and for that I can, partially, thank the crisis. There are stories I want to share here but am not sure I can. There are stories to be told, but for now they can only be told in person. Take that as a thinly veiled invitation to come out and visit. In the interim, I’ll be sharing as much as I can on these very pages.

Flaubert once wrote, and I’m not sure if I’m quoting directly or paraphrasing here, that you should endeavour to be regular and orderly in your life so as to be violent and original in your work. I want to spin that dictum on its head and opt for the converse: I want to live life in as violent and original a manner as possible and be regular and orderly in my work – or in this case, my blog.

I might as well sign off on the theme of finance and markets here, though this is surely a message that can be applied to life as a whole. It’s worth a couple of reads, or enough to let the message and its parallels sink in.

‘Even apart from the instability due to speculation, there is the instability due to the characteristic of human nature that a large proportion of our positive activities depend on spontaneous optimism rather than mathematical expectations, whether moral or hedonistic or economic. Most, probably, of our decisions to do something positive, the full consequences of which will be drawn out over many days to come, can only be taken as the result of animal spirits – a spontaneous urge to action rather than inaction, and not as the outcome of a weighted average of quantitative benefits multiplied by quantitative probabilities.’ (The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, John Maynard Keynes)

Disclosure: past performance is no guarantee of future results

Appendix

Other manifestations and inspirations for this blog title:

On thought and reflection: being a treatise on man as ‘a social animal whose thought is the reflection of the movement of matter’ (Czeslaw Milosz)

‘A virtuous, ordinary life, striving for wisdom but never far from folly, is achievement enough.’ (Alain de Botton)

Thus, ‘In pursuit of wisdom (yet never far from folly)’ was a definite possibility, but it lacks the bravura of a proper blog title. I’ve just used bravura without being 100% sure whether I know what it properly means, by the way.

‘The thoughtful animal’, my original choice for a title, was already taken. 

Funfare for the Common Man is, of course, a slight derivation of Fanfare for the Common Man, Aaron Copland being one of my favourite composers.

The Layman’s Guide can be read here.