There was once a coworker who demonstrated to me the desperate need to evolve with the market through his failures. These lessons were conveyed through his career demise, rather than by his explicit instruction. If trading were a natural history of Earth, then he was a T. Rex relinquishing dominance to a mammalian rat like me.

The myth surrounding the man was that he was once a big pit trader, who could corner the market with his size and extort profits from the competition. This was when the definitive stereotype of traders being garrulous, physical men in colourful jackets gesticulating exaggeratedly at each other was still the popular mental image of the era. He was equally great at reading markets as he was at reading human behaviour, which allowed him to edge out other traders to the point that he likened pit trading to picking up diamonds off the ground.

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