Anton Kreil reveals his secrets in trading.

North West of England. I started investing and trading in physical shares. There was no leverage and I was paying stamp duty and commission on each transaction. I was making money on the positions so I added money every week from evening and summer jobs I was doing. Secondly, I also chose my A-levels based around the idea that I wanted a career in the financial markets. So I made sure that I chose Economics. I wanted to learn about the financial system and how everything worked.

TRADERS´: When did you decide to aim for a professional trading career?

Anton Kreil: After finishing my A-Levels I studied Economics at the University of Manchester, by which time I had managed to build a decent size portfolio at the time from trading. I was not a “typical” student per se. I hardly ever went to “student nights” instead preferring to go out to “local” bars, restaurants and nightclubs. I also attendedonly about one third of all lectures and tutorials over the three years I was there. Economics at Manchester had over four hundred registered students in my year. The lecture theatres were always packed and it was always difficult to get the seat at the back that I wanted. This wonderful thing called the internethad just become available and the course administrators had decided to put the entire course notes online. So I bought a personal computer from a government insolvency auction for next to nothing and attended university most days from my bedroom, choosing to spend the majority of my time researching and putting on trades.

TRADERS´: How was your thinking different compared to other students?

Anton Kreil: I pretty much operated on the fringes of the student community. Beyond the odd conversation, I just did not get on with most students. They all seemed to be at university because they could not do anything else or did not know what else to do. I guess that is fair enough if daddy or the government is paying. Also at university I could not understand why so many people wanted to become accountants. The argument seemed to be that the average national salary is £25,000, but if I work for one of the big accounting firms I will earn £40,000. My response was “so what”? That is about £550 per week after tax. Surely if I was working and living in London as an accountant I would spend that? So it is therefore a zero sum game and a total waste of time! I realised quickly it was not aboutthe money for these people. It was to enable them to do a “safe”and “respectable” profession that perhaps mildly impressed their parents and other people. As long as those people told themselves they were “great” then they all must get some sort of self affirmation out of that.

TRADERS´: Certainly you would not have wanted to be an accountant in the first place.

Anton Kreil: I decided I was not going to measure myself on a relative basis but on an absolute basis. All these people telling each other that what they were doing was the right thing just all seemed totally wrong. None of them seemed to have the ability to think outside the box. The way I viewed it was that my downside would be that I ended up doing an average job for £25,000 a year, so a £15,000 difference or £200 difference per week to being an accountant, but I would also have infinite upside. I decided to multiply everything by at least ten before I considered it so that any opportunity would have to present me with the potential to earn ten times the national average salary within a few years. So I just focused solely on my own trading and getting ajob as a trader at an investment bank.

TRADERS´: Did you manage to get a foot in the door?

Anton Kreil: It worked. In my final year at university I was given an unconditional offer to work on the Goldman Sach’s Pan European Equities trading desk. I had basically by-passed the Human Resources department and had eight interviews in one day. I was given the contract to sign at 8pm in the evening by the head of Equities.

TRADERS´: Please tell us about your training and your first day on the floor.

Anton Kreil: When I first got on the trading floor and was shown my seat at Goldman I had already been in “training” in New York for a few months. The “training” in New York was not training for becoming a trader. It was a generic all round applied finance course, run by Goldman Executives and outside contractors. The real education started when I actually started doing it. It is really funny looking back at my first day on the desk. I sat down and the boss gave me a $10 million limit. The guy next to me was told to make sure that I do not do anything stupid and to teach me how to use the system. It was the tech boom, we were in a massive bull market and they threw me in at the deep end. My first thought when looking at the screen was that the bid and the offer were the other way round to what I was used to. I asked the guy next to me if that was right and he said “yes”. I asked him if that means I have to now learn the opposite of everything I had ever known. He laughed hilariously and told everyone on the desk. The message back was “Absolutely. Try to learn the opposite of everything you have ever learnt about trading”. I came to realise that this was so true! Soon I found out that the guy I was sitting next to was one of the largest tech’ stock traders in the world!