John Arnold

The sports card business started to boom.

And so there was more and more money coming into it, more and more cards.

A lot of the dealers in and around Texas weren't caught up on day-to-day, week-to-week price changes.

Oftentimes they had cards that were more valuable on the West Coast or East Coast or in the North.

So I would just run around every weekend to a bunch of card shows.

I was living in Dallas at the time, but would travel to Houston and Louisiana, Oklahoma.

I started getting on planes when I was 16 and going to big card shows around the nation.

And I just always had this sense of value of what something was worth at the time.

Turns out there were a lot of similarities between doing that and trading.

I was in a way doing market making and sports cards.

And I was taking advantage of arbitrage opportunities and sports cards, knowing what every product is worth at every moment.

stuck with me.

And that was my mantra when I was trading gas is that I knew what every month was worth better than I think anybody else did.

And I would do that.

And I knew that every moment of the day to do that intense focus and just sitting there and just staring at the screen and listening to every trade that happens in the market.

all day long, every day.

It was primarily futures and swaps that were a lookalike to the future.

I traded natural gas.

The hub for natural gas trading was Henry Hub in Louisiana.

And then there would be price differentials between what gas was worth in Louisiana versus gas in Pennsylvania or in West Texas or Colorado, for instance.