Читать книгу The Guts and Glory of Day Trading - Mark Ingebretsen - Страница 23

For some reason, on New Year’s Eve 1996, all the stress came to a head. “My sister was coming to visit,” she remembers. “I had tickets for a New Year’s Eve performance of the Three Tenors. I had bought tickets for my boyfriend, my mom, my sister and her boyfriend, and myself. They were $1,500 apiece. It had been a particularly horrible expiration the week before. And I was still wound up.”

Lo remembers coming home to cook dinner. And then the taxi ride to the performance. As everyone settled into their seats at the concert, she spotted some of the people she worked at Canaccord. Suddenly the room began to spin. Her hands started to shake, and her heart pounded. She ended up having to leave before the concert even started.

That night and in the days that followed, Lo started coming to grips with all that had happened to her during 1996. The year had begun with the death of her half-sister and ended with Lo taking by far the biggest risk of her trading career. “It had been a whole year of doing really dangerous things, “she says. “I looked back and I thought, ‘A year ago, when you came back from the funeral you had 20 grand, and look at this ... a million dollars.’ And oh my God look at the risks I took to do it. What if it never worked out? I danced through a minefield for a whole year.”

Ask her why she took such a huge risk, and why she didn’t set a portion of her profits aside instead of letting the bet ride even as it grew progressively larger, and Lo will answer without hesitation. “Because to me, having 20 grand was the same as having nothing.”