| | I still remember my first day of work at Constellation in July 2005. It was like landing on a different planet. For a start, people talked in a different language. Here, a "curve" can be "flat" and "flat" means either no change or a zero value. Moreover, "F" is January, "Dees" and "Z" are both December, "Ercot" is Texas, "vol" is an "option", and an "option" is much, much more than just a choice! As if that's not enough, "long" is nothing to do with duration of time or extent in space and "PNL" are the three most important and heart-wrenching letters in the alphabet.
People also looked quite different from me. They were all male except one, mostly white Americans, and save for a few, each of them was almost twice my mass.
They also cussed a lot. I had never heard the f word used in so many different forms before-- it's a noun, a verb, an adjective. One guy used it in his every other word that my (rare) non-cussing co-workers started keeping a tally. 
Welcome to the power trading floor. My primary responsibility was to provide the power traders a daily PNL ("profit and loss") report and its reconciliation with a similar report by the accounting group. It wasn't that challenging conceptually but through that task I learned how to use Excel functions and the weird-looking, DOS-based risk management system called SecDb. There were days I felt that it was a thankless task, what with the occasional trader crushing my report into a ball as soon as he saw his miserable PNL on it.
But I am thankful for the nice colleagues in my team. They patiently explained to me what "curve", "flat", and "long" means, and how the business worked. Thus, I stepped into this world called derivatives trading and I thought it was fascinatingly clever.
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Note: I haven't written Part 1 and 3 yet (learning this technique from the Star Wars people...heheh..)
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| | Posted 4/15/2009 9:44 PM - 5 Views - 2 eProps - 1 Comment
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