Last winter, I had a really good business idea.  I figured I should wait until we moved before I started it, since I didn't want to take a month off after I just started the business.  Not sure if you remember, but when I was a trader, I was known as a broker's wet dream.  In a typical good trading year, my brokerage could be anywhere from 30-100+% of my net trading profits.  In a bad trading year, brokerage could be like a bajillion percent of my trading profits (assuming it was positive).  Anyway, I was always pretty good at coming up with and evaluating trading structures.  Alas, this is for interest rate derivatives (so nothing useful any of you guys can use).

So I said to myself, if I go back to trading I can make 10-12% of my trading profits.  Hedge funds pay more, but I really need to work at a big bank to do what I was doing.  I would go into the office and be there like 10 hours a day, 2 hour round-trip commute, watch the markets sometimes overnight (my markets trade 23 hours a day, 5 days a week).  I'll write a later post about why trading is not as great as people think - it's an awesome job, but there are lots of things people don't realize.

Or...

I can make 25% of say, 80% (my typical brokerage) of my trading profits.  And I can work from home.  And I just need to spend a few hours a day.  This assumes that I can get the rest of the market to put on the same volume as I alone had on in my book.  But there are plenty of trades where I can get people do do way more volume than I could in my book for risk management reasons.  So there was some upside to the uncertainty.

Thanks to the DOJ, I had a lot of free time on my hands so I started it two weeks ago.  I'm working with one of my ex-brokers to do this.  I get access to his clients and he gets access to a bunch of trade ideas and market thoughts (and hopefully trade volume) he wouldn't have gotten otherwise.  We split the brokerage.  Win-win.

We're still trying to get the clients to accept me as someone knowledgeable in the markets, so that will take time (or a bunch of profitable trades in a row).  We didn't reach a lot of people last week between the London bank holiday on Monday and the royal wedding on Friday.  But I still made about as much as I make in a typical poker week, so we're moving along.

The general plan is that I do this for a few hours in the morning and I play poker for a few hours in the afternoon.  We'll see how that goes.

The reason I'm mentioning this is just to highlight how important it is to have life outs.  Whether it's finishing school or fostering a good network of friends, or whatever, think things through and give yourself some options, in case your current option #1 doesn't work as well as you had hoped.