1987 was a year I will never forget. Or, I survived Black Monday

I had completed my first year at Wharton and was looking for experience in my major, finance. I was invited to take a job at a small firm in North Miami Beach.

To become a financial analyst on Wall Street was the epitome of the undergraduate experience at that time, and would be for years.

One of my fraternity brothers and I would pore over “The Wall Street Journal” & “New York Times” every single morning. We phoned each other from different rooms on the fourth floor of our house.

We would watch “Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser,”’ broadcast on PBS. CNBC was not a “thing” yet.

Dan Dorfman was a favorite of ours.

We delved even further into corporate financials at the Wharton Grad School’s computer room. Access to Dow Jones, Standard & Poor, and other expensive news services. We studied companies and looked at their SEC filings.

Rarely did we see other students use the opportunity like us.

We had the gumption to reach out to a few M&A specialists that had offices on the Mainline. We put together an acquisition book to pitch an acquisition of a computer chain in the Tri-State area.

We turned our voluminous dot-matrix notes into a professional looking deck that Kinko’s printed for us.

The team of financiers were interested in the concept…

but,

turned us down with some interesting parting comments about dreams and wisdom.

This publicly traded company would later be bought by a larger chain, for a much higher valuation, as demand for PCs exploded in the 90s.

That summer, I started with the Series 7 exam. My world had literally changed overnight as I solicited clients by cold calling & networking.

My fraternity brother had plenty of trades for us to execute…

so we did.

We started with a couple thousand dollars and traded mostly options to get more leverage.

By early fall we had traded to about $25k in the account. I spent every day calling a “WATS” line to my firm in Florida to get opinions, also spoke with my clients quite frequently to get their perspective.

& then,

Black Friday hit.

I ordered call options for Foster Wheeler, IBM, Merck, and a few other large companies and saw that my trades were not all getting through.

By Monday,

the market simply collapsed.

My calls to my colleagues were moribund & depressed.

But,

I still believed in the market and the economy.

My parents called from a trip in China to make sure I was ok.

I pled with a broker I was close to (my cousin) to fill orders.

He refused.

I begged my cousin to look outside.

The sun was shining.
The world was fine.

It was going to be alright.

My trades mostly didn’t go through in the frenzy of those days. I sometimes wonder how much money I would have made had the orders been executed.

Yet,

I survived.

I learned valuable lessons about markets, people, psychology, and ultimately…

myself.

To succeed, you need to believe.

A quality I learned, to never give up.