THE OUTSIDER: Crash landings
It's a bad time. Yes, there are still a few people out there in denial, claiming to have made money in the turmoil, and fewer still who might even be telling the truth, but most of us are a lot poorer than we were. A lot poorer.
In the days of my foolhardy and reckless youth, I enjoyed parachuting. Yes, really. I was young enough still to believe I would live forever, and the thrill seemed to justify the potential downside. But the key skill wasn't jumping. It was landing. Do whatever acrobatics you like between exiting the plane, your canopy opening, and hitting the ground, but it was the moment of impact that counted. Get it wrong and you become what the Parachute Regiment calls a meat bomb. Get it right and you step down neatly onto terra firma, or if necessary do an elegant roll, but either way you walk away from the drop zone with body and dignity intact.
Walking away from the current crisis with anything at all intact is much more of a challenge. Compared with these markets, parachuting is easy. So here are a few thoughts on what I've seen people getting right and wrong.
If it hurts, you don't have to hide it. Everybody's hurting, and in a way it lets us all off the hook. It was a tsunami. No-one could fight it, and the very few who profited from it were probably lucky. So no false bravado. In this climate it's too transparent. For once, modesty and humility are the order of the day.
This is a good time for reflection. Inactivity can temporarily be a virtue and filling time with the kind of thinking you don't get to indulge in during busy markets is a luxury.
Think laterally. You never know where that reflection may lead. A friend who worked in a middle management role at a now-defunct hedge fund is consulting with a major firm as it overhauls its risk management systems - and, in parallel, in his now free evenings, he is working on his own portfolio management strategy. When the market turns, as it eventually will, he'll have a certified track record in running a trend-following managed futures product that would have only been a pipe dream in the frantic days of 'normality' before the crisis. Another friend has become a trustee of a small but dynamic charity that combines the arts with disability action. And another is finishing his first novel.
No-one would have chosen to go through what we've witnessed - and it's not over yet - but people who work in the City are talented, driven, energetic, resilient, hugely dynamic and given half a chance multi-faceted.
Every cloud has a silver lining, and we're all capable of making our own luck, regardless of how tough things seem. A whole raft of unexpected winners will emerge from the current mess and will prosper from it. The key defining characteristic of all of them will be that they didn't sit still but got up and did something different. Whatever you may think about life in the City, it is rarely dull.
And in the meantime, fasten your seatbelts, assume crash positions, and brace for impact.
David Charters' book, Trust me, I'm a banker, is published by Elliott and Thompson, price 9.99.
