Turney Duff's Blog, page 10
January 13, 2015
Common Core Means Teachers Can’t Do What’s Best for their Students
I peeked into the classroom to see if my teacher was alone. He wasn’t. Some other student was getting extra help after school. I started to pace back and forth in the hallway by the burnt-orange lockers. I guess you could say I was nervous. It was my first-ever pitch meeting, not that I knew it at the time. I decided to try different combinations on one of the locks—you know, just to see if I could open it. After about 10 failed attempts, I saw the other student leave. I entered my teacher’s classroom with an overstated smile.
“Turney, my boy,” Mr. Foster said. “To what do I owe the good pleasure?”
Mr. Foster was my junior English teacher. He was a jolly fellow who loved teaching. He looked like he was right out of Central Casting, with his thinning hair, glasses, bowtie and suspenders. He was the epitome of a high school English teacher. He talked like one too. In class he would say things like, “You’re all a bunch of perverts,” and, “This is absolutely titillating.”
January 11, 2015
9.5 Reasons to Watch the College Football Championships
I s
lipped demurely into the den on New Year’s Day to sneak-watch some of the Ohio State vs. Alabama semifinal football game. In the other room, between dinner and desert, family and friends were gathered around the dining room table discussing the upcoming season of Downton Abbey. They wouldn’t miss me for a little bit. I clicked the television remote and turned down the volume. I was just trying to get the score and watch a few plays.
“Is that the Super Bowl?” I heard behind me.
I was caught. My nine-year-old daughter, Lola, eyed me suspiciously.
“No. It’s college football, but the winner advances to the college version of the Super Bowl,” I said.
“But you didn’t go to either one of those colleges, did you?” she asked.
“No, but it’s an important game,” I said. “This is the first year they’ve ever had a playoff in college.”
“Who are you rooting for?”
“Ohio State.”
“Then I’m rooting for the other team.”
“That’d be Alabama,” I said. “Next week we can watch the championship game together.”
“No thanks,” she said. “Can you change the channel?”
Okay, I get it. My daughter wasn’t particularly interested in the new College Football Playoff format—although it turns out a lot of other people are. This year’s Rose Bowl and Sugar Bowl, home of the semifinal rounds on ESPN, were the #1 and #2 most watched shows in the entire history of cable television, with about 28 million viewers each. On Monday night, that record will almost certainly fall as the Ohio State Buckeyes kick off against the University of Oregon Ducks (8:30 p.m. on ESPN) for the first ever true national championship game.
Maybe you don’t care all that much about college football either, but the truth is we’re on the verge of having a second Super Bowl in this country. And even if you’re not the biggest sports fan, there are some good reasons to tune in. Here are 9 1/2 of them.
January 2, 2015
2014 Facebook Feed Year in Review
As the new year begins, I’m still reflecting on how our news feeds on Facebook were filled with tragedy, angst and social unrest over the last 12 months. Robin Williams, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Maya Angelou died. The deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner sparked outrage against police brutality and racism. Add L.A. Clippers owner Donald Sterling, the Ray Rice domestic abuse case, and the Bill Cosby rape allegations, and it seems like there was only disturbing news in 2014.
Ah, but that’s not entirely true. So here’s a look back at what might have been our collective Facebook feed if we’d all shared it together.
December 31, 2014
This is totally Illegal… And I did it every year…
An excerpt from my book The Buy Side about the last day of the trading year.
The rest of Christmas week is quiet, as is Monday and Tuesday the following week. Though trading on Wednesday, New Year’s Eve, is also light—the Street is making last-minute plans or hoping to get out of Dodge—for me it’s one of the most important days of the year. This is the only trading day when unrealized profit and losses count towards your performance, whereas the rest of the year positions must be closed-out either by a sell or cover to be a realized gain or loss. The reason this is significant is because it’s the number we use to calculate our year-end performance. Then we take our 20 percent cut and I get my bonus.
There’s something known as “ripping a stock,” which is a manipulation of the stock price. Essentially, that’s what I’m trying to do today. The more stocks I can rip today the better our number will be for year.
I begin by identifying our ten largest positions that are illiquid. By illiquid I mean companies that don’t trade more than a few hundred thousand shares a day. It’s much easier to move the price with these than say a stock that trades a million shares a day. I find names like CYBX, Cyberonics, a neuromodulator company engaged in the design, development and commercialization of implantable medical devices that provide vagus nerve stimulation therapy for the treatment of refractory epilepsy and treatment-resistant depression. What? I have no idea what that means and I don’t care. The stock fits my criteria. Once I have all the stocks identified, I wait until the market is almost closed for the year to make my move.
Then about three o’clock in the afternoon, I get a call from a broker named Stacey who works for a firm that is light on research, but heavy on hustle and expense account—she’s taken me on several trips. Like all of my brokers, I talk to Stacey every day. But, she’s calling me at this moment because I ripped stocks with her on the last year on this day and she wants to know if I’m going to use her again. For her it’s a great boost to her commission run, millions of shares to trade with no risk. Her excuse for why she needs the orders early is so she can prepare. Bullshit! The thing about ripping stocks is the bigger banks like Goldman and Morgan Stanley won’t do it. You need a firm like Stacey’s that plays it fast and loose. Let me get right back to you, I say. And I hang up the phone.
In one way, I have to hand it to Stacey. She’s got a lot of balls. When I used her last year, I knew she leaked my orders to another client so they could front run my trades. I knew this because the stocks began to tick up before the time I told her to put my orders in. And now she’s on the phone again this year, looking to do the same thing. But I’m not the same trader I was last year. I’ve invested so much of my time and energy in trying to get people to like me. I still want everybody to love me. But if you are going to try and fuck me, I’ll fuck you harder. Maybe it was the MDRX trade Rosenbach had me shut out of, or maybe it’s just the natural jading process you go through working at a hedge fund. But whatever it is, Stacey has just made a huge mistake.
At 3:30, I call her back and explain how important this year is to me, and how I really need her to do a great job. Then I give her the orders with explicit instruction to not trade them until 3:55. “Not a second before,” I say.
“I know,” she says.
There are ten companies, and I’m shorting each million shares. I repeat the list of ten stocks back to her. A short of a million shares of CYBX in five minutes, for example, would typically take the stock down at least $5, probably more.
I have the ten stocks up on my computer screen so I can monitor them. At about 3:40, they start to move a little lower until all of them are red, negative for the day. I’m sure Stacey leaked my orders again. I call her. Remember, I tell her; don’t start selling any of my orders until 3:55. “Of course,” she says, sounding almost insulted I’d call to remind her. At 3:51, the stocks are still going down. At 3:52 they get hit another .30 cents. At 3:53 they are beginning to hold at their lower levels and at 3:54 it’s time for me to go to work. Whoever front ran my order is done and is waiting to buy them back when I hit the market. They think they’ll make a few easy bucks. It’s then I pick up the phone. “I know, I know,” Stacey says. “I’m getting ready to short all your stocks right now.”
“Actually,” I say calmly, “cancel all my orders.” The silence is priceless.
“What?” she finally manages to say.
“Cancel all my orders” I say. I’d reminded her twice not to place the orders until 3:55. It was 3:54, and she has no out.
As soon as I hang up the phone, I call Gus and give him the real orders; they’re actually buys not sells. By 3:56 the stocks are moving higher. By 3:57 almost all of them are flat on the day. By 3:58 they’re ripping—Gus and Stacey’s client can’t buy them fast enough, and by closing bell I’m up a few dollars on all of them. When Gus calls back with reports, he tells me he was only able to buy a few hundred thousand of each stock. He feels bad. I tell him it’s perfect. Argus just made an extra ten million dollars.
I call Stacey a couple of minutes later and apologize for the canceling of my orders. At the last minute, I say, we decided we didn’t need to short any of those stocks. “Not a big deal,” she manages to say, but she sounds sick to her stomach. Whoever she leaked my orders to must be livid with her. They had to have gotten crushed. Undoubtedly, they paid a much higher price than where they shorted it in front of my fake orders. Trading 101: buy low, sell high. Ooops. Nothing worse than losing a few million dollars in the last minute of the year. Happy New Year, I tell Stacey, but she’s already hung up the phone. I know it’s going to be a happy one for me.
December 30, 2014
Why I Now Believe in the Power of Psychic Mediums
One of the first mediums I ever saw was Whoopi Goldberg on screen as Oda Mae Brown in the 1990 movie Ghost. She played a charlatan who discovered, to her surprise, that she actually did have psychic ability.
But that was just Hollywood being Hollywood, I thought. It’s not real.
A year later, a friend of mine made an appointment for both of us to see a psychic (you know, just for fun). I didn’t tell anyone else about what we were doing because people who went to see psychics were a little off. If I started believing in this crap, I reasoned, I’d lose some of my edge. It’s called “free will” for a reason, and I wasn’t ready to give mine up. I picked my friend up and we made jokes the entire way there.
We drove down a desolate backwoods road in Maine and parked next to a car without wheels raised up on cinder blocks. We walked inside a broken-down trailer and sat down in the makeshift kitchen across from a woman with long, tangled hair, named Wendy. The setting was creepy, but that’s where it ended.
December 15, 2014
You might have an Office Nickname (you don’t even know about)
This is a true story that happened to my friend Christina years ago. She was working at a public relations firm with a pack of twenty other recent college graduates. Just a step above interns, they were expected to do everything except use their brains. Still, they were happy to be employed and hoping to advance. After a few months on the job, Christina and the cast of twenty or so newbies were summoned to the conference room. No one was getting promoted, but someone was about to be fired.
The manager circled the oval table jam-packed with Christina and her co-workers. Her boss started explaining how someone had been stealing lunches from the kitchen. And when they discovered who had been doing it, the person would be terminated immediately.
December 11, 2014
Yesterday was a big day for insider trading
Insider trading just got a whole lot easier.
The ambiguity of what constitutes insider trading has been the biggest deterrent of illegal practices over the last 6 years — that and watching all the perp walks down by City Hall on television. As soon as the crackdown began in 2009, fear has been running rampant on the Street. Nobody wanted to be next. Two days ago if you asked ten traders what exactly was considered trading on inside information —you would have gotten ten similar, but also very different answers because no one really knew exactly where the line was drawn in the sand. And that was terrifying.
December 9, 2014
Fear & Parenting
I’m car number 12 out of 18. Two men in black and gold security jackets and sunglasses stand at the front of the line, directing traffic. With a wave of their hands they instruct each driver to move forward. We inch along slowly, haltingly, tensely, like tourists trying to cross the border from Mexico back into the U.S. The security guys look tough; they remind me of bouncers at a Manhattan bar I frequented in the ’90s. I turn off my radio.
It’s almost my turn and the security guys look me up and down. I smile. They give me an obligatory half-smile, a half-nod; all business. When I’m close enough, I throw my car in park, jump out and run around to the other side. My daughter is in the back seat (of course). She unbuckles and grabs her backpack. I reach in and grab the large black case next to her—her cello—and hand it to her. With a kiss on the forehead I tell her to have a great day at school, and I linger for just a moment as I watch her—dwarfed by the instrument—march toward early morning orchestra practice.
Just before she disappears into another gauntlet of security, I have to move on. There’s a long line of cars behind mine. One of the security guards shakes his head and waves his hand for me to leave.
As I drive home, I start thinking about this article: how different life is now from when I was growing up, starting with how extensive the security is at my daughter’s elementary school, where we live on Long Island in the New York City suburbs, as opposed to my experience 35 years ago.
December 2, 2014
The Feeling of Knowing you Paralyzed Someone
We hear clicking cleats on concrete as the other team walks toward our football field. They already look defeated. They know they’re in trouble. We’ve had eight games so far this season, and we’ve let the opposition score a combined total of three points against us. We lost our first game to Colby College 3-0 and we’ve since pitched seven consecutive shutout victories. We don’t just want to win; we want to dominate. We don’t just want to tackle them when they have the ball; we want them to remember being tackled. We play like a pack of wild dogs.
It’s snowing. Slush covers the field. Big flakes continue to fall. Kents Hill School took a two-hour bus ride to get here—here being, New Hampton Prep, where I’m continuing my education. I graduated from high school last year, and I’ve added a post-graduate year. . I want to play football in college, and an extra season will allow me to get bigger, faster and stronger.
Our whole team is a little off. Every guy has a backstory. He wants to get bigger, or he wants to improve his grades or there’s some other reason why he landed in a remote town in the mountains of New Hampshire for a fifth year of high school. We’re a team of 22 kids from all over New England. Most of us had success on the field in high school. And we’re all a little bit mental.
The other team should have stayed home. By the third quarter the snow has stopped, but we haven’t. We’ve got another shutout on the board in the third quarter. Kents Hill has the ball, and they accomplish something opposing teams rarely do—they get the ball past our side of the 50-yard line. They desperately want to score. It’d be a victory to do what no other team has done all season against us—score a touchdown. But not today. Not on our watch.
