List Detail - Chapel Talk Archive

Joe Martinez

The first time I thought about having a family was during a tsunami. I was 25 years old, and there wasn’t anyone in my life that I wanted to start a family with, and I wasn’t technically anywhere near the tsunami, but I have a brain that is sometimes capable of thinking thoughts and making connections, and for some reason, that tsunami eventually changed the way I thought about the world.  I was sitting on a trading desk in midtown Manhattan in front of six blinking computer screens, reading reports about a massive earthquake that sent waves well over one hundred feet high crashing down onto the eastern coastline of Japan. One headline claimed that nuclear reactors were melting down. And there I sat, thinking vaguely about how this catastrophic event would impact so many people almost 7,000 miles away. Soon after, that brief moment of sympathy was tamped down and the trading question kicked in. Who owned those nuclear reactors? I typed away on my Bloomberg terminal. The company was called Tokyo Electric Power, or TEPCO.  TEPCO traded in Tokyo, but there was also an ADR - an American Depository Receipt - which traded in the United States under the ticker symbol TKECY. When it became clear to me that this was really, really bad news, I called our prime broker, borrowed as many shares of TKECY as he would give me, and started a short position, betting that the stock price would go lower.  I would hold the position until the markets opened in Tokyo that night.  

At 4 p.m., as markets closed in New York, I sat at my desk and watched a few people pack up and leave the office for the day, though the vast majority of us would stay well into the night. Across the desk from me, Nick was reading research reports as he doggedly pursued the next big trade. Dave sat to my left. He had three kids and made a habit of dodging their games, recitals, and parties by always having a trade on. Steve sat to my right. A few years later, he would be banned from the financial industry for insider trading. John was behind me; that week he had gotten into a shouting match on the phone with his ex-wife because their son had left something in her carry-on bag which most certainly should not be in a carry-on bag when one hopes to board a trans-Atlantic flight. 

When Tokyo opened, TEPCO was down 30%. I continued trading until 2 a.m. when the Japanese market closed.  My Bloomberg terminal now scrolled through headlines of death tolls, waves reaching three miles inland, and reports of nuclear contamination. All around me, colleagues congratulated each other; the market turmoil that resulted from natural disasters was good for our business. I can’t escape blame here. That twelve-hour stretch was tremendously exciting. I got to read, develop ideas, place bets, hedge bets, it was competitive, and I got real-time feedback as my profit or loss ticked higher or lower each second of each trading day. I had complete discretion to manage the firm’s money however I saw fit.  But I also have a brain that is sometimes capable of thinking thoughts and making connections, and I knew that profiting off of misery wasn’t something that I’d be able to justify away for an entire career. I escaped into the elevator bay and walked home.  

My apartment complex was on a dead end street in midtown between First Avenue and the East River. I knew that sleep would be a futile endeavor, so when I got home I put on sweatpants and a sweatshirt, walked up a few flights of stairs, jumped over the “No Trespassing” sign that guarded the entrance to the building’s roof, wedged the door open with a scrap of wood, and walked out.  The wind whipped in off of the river. West was the Citigroup Center, still speckled with lights from investment banking analysts who probably hadn’t slept in the last 48 hours. The Queensboro Bridge was a dull, incessant rumble. Far north the lights of Harlem and The Bronx wavered at the horizon, dissipating into the black, cloudless sky.  Everything was wind, water, steel, and concrete. I fixated on the water and thought about my grandfather.

Almost eighty years earlier, he had come to New York City from Puerto Rico by water - on a steamship called the S.S. Ponce. That steamship was owned by the Porto Rico Steamship Company. And now I was imagining a group of gentlemen huddling in a nondescript office building in midtown Manhattan right around the time when the Great Depression was sinking its grip into the United States’ economy. They were holding short positions in the Porto Rico Steamship Company and rooting for a hurricane, or a rogue wave, or a very out-of-place iceberg, that might send the S.S. Ponce to the murky depths of the Atlantic. The investors would be paid handsomely as the passengers struggled to survive. 

My father was a high school physics teacher. I called him the next day to talk about teaching. When my mother heard the gist of the conversation from across the room, she joined the call. She wanted to make sure that I understood how much money I’d forego if I were to leave the financial world. 

“And it compounds,” she said. “Do you know about interest?” 

I assured her that I did know about interest.

It was at this point that my dad interrupted and said: “The compensation will be the same, just different.” I was confused. 

In the months that followed, I started to volunteer at a local middle school on Fridays. Then, Thursdays and Fridays. Eventually, the head of the trading desk asked if I was really committed to trading international equities. I was honest with him. “I think I’m going to try teaching,” I said. He was confused.

Now, I understand what my dad meant. I get to discuss novels, short stories, plays, and poems with many of you. I get to read your work. Though it’s hard to place a nominal value on the feeling a teacher gets when a student acquires new knowledge, or is particularly proud of a piece of writing they produce, it’s clear to me that those moments are valuable. I get to be part of a soccer program and though it’s difficult to put a dollar value on watching our team strive for lofty goals, those moments are certainly valuable. I got to make Lars, and Jay, and Oz, and Kiefer, and the other preseason soccer attendees run all over campus at 5:30am. That was a valuable moment. And I would have never met my wife Anna, who is also a teacher, if I had continued in finance. That was a valuable moment. Now we have three kids and seeing Audrey, Harper, and Noah interacting with many of you - special thanks to their favorite people Michelle and Morgan and Emelie - those moments are valuable. 

Distilling this experience of leaving finance and becoming a teacher into a throwaway line like, “Do what you love,” doesn’t really help you, or anyone as far as I can tell. Many of you, potentially most of you, probably all of you, will feel the pull of money as you work your way toward careers. That pursuit will jostle you and make you do weird things. I stood on the roof of my apartment building after that long trading day and I was happy, and sad, and felt like a conquering hero, and I was profoundly lonely, and I wanted to keep trading, and I knew that I should probably leave that industry. When I think back on that moment standing up on the roof and looking down at the East River, I realize now that after almost three years of trading, the Japanese tsunami was the first time I really stopped to think about what I was doing. It was the first moment that I wondered whether I could be a good trader and also be a good person, a good partner, a good friend, and eventually, a good parent. I became so entrenched in that job that everything fell to the wayside: family, friends, health, hobbies. I was rushing from trade to trade and there wasn’t room for anything else.

The more apt and timely takeaway for all of you might be to think about your stretch of time here at Groton. You are working hard to get grades to put on a transcript to go to a college to get a career to satisfy your expectations and potentially external expectations. I traveled that path and I know the weighty and consequential academic and career commitments with which we all seem to mark time. I wonder if you’re like me. Are you rushing from essay to test to presentation to project to exam to college essay to interview? If you are, you’ve got to find time for what Fiona Reenan coined, “in-between moments” in our Expo class. In-between moments are the late-night conversations with friends, sharing slow meals, not studying during surprise holidays, watching plays, attending dances, attending concerts, embracing long bus trips, early, early, early morning runs, memorable sporting events, and so on, and so forth. Hopefully, you already have moments like these, and I would bet that the value of those in-between moments will grow in the years to come. You’ll remember those moments when times get tough, you’ll recount those moments with friends, and those moments will come to define your time here on the Circle much more than the big ticket events that you’re rushing toward. So, if you don’t mind some financial advice this morning - invest as much as you can afford in those in-between moments. I didn’t do that in New York, and now those four years seem like warm sand through dry fingers. 

During the fall term I was walking with Noah - he’s our one-year-old baby boy. It had rained all day and there was still a spitting misty drizzle that lingered. Noah was being pulled into the orbit of every puddle that the Circle produced, and there I was, holding his hand but really only half-there. I was rushing toward the essays that I should be grading and the planning I needed to do for the next novel and the garbage needed to be taken out. And then, Noah jumped into the deepest puddle he’d been able to find, spraying murky water in all directions. And then, Noah sat in that puddle. And then, he considered what he had just done for a few seconds, and he decided to remain seated. My initial frustration with the unanticipated water now soaking through my sneakers dissolved when I saw Noah’s wide grin beaming up at me. He can’t really talk, but I’m certain he was saying, “Hey idiot, it’s just water, and this is just a moment, and soon it will be gone.” So, I squatted down next to him and we ran our fingers through the water and I made up a song about a fish and for at least a few moments I forgot about rushing toward anything.
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