Experienced traders offer advice to exhausted juniors: "Burnout? It's been four days!"

By all accounts, some traders have had a great quarter. More will become clear tomorrow when JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley report their first quarter results, but Coalition Greenwich has now joined the chorus claiming that it's been a fine time for equities and macro traders, with the prediction that markets revenues will be up 15%-20% year-on-year in Q1. Higher volatility has, hypothetically, been good for some.

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It's also been exhausting. The gyrations that began last Thursday have created some of the most heavily traded, tumultuous markets in years. Yesterday ended up being one of the best days for stocks for nearly two decades, but no one would have believed that in the morning.

As traders attempt to stay on Trump's bronco, sagacious forebears are shooting advice from the sidelines. "In crisis markets, there is no such thing as overbought and oversold. Don’t be the person that fades the whole bear market all the way down. In a crisis, stocks can stay oversold for ages and then get wildly overbought days later," wrote ex-Citi and HSBC FX trader Brent Donnelly presciently a few days ago. "Get involved and trade like you know you can," he commanded. "Have courage."

Anthony Wainer, a former managing director in leveraged finance trading at Morgan Stanley and portfolio manager at Moore Capital in London, has been drinking multiple espressos while watching the markets and lamenting that he's no longer trading institutional money. "With the right mandate, these are the best markets," Wainer says. "A well-signalled negative catalyst, over-delivered, 100% negative press over the weekend. Proper, proper panic and then Cramer and crying Bill Ackman calling the bottom for you perfectly...it's times like these..."

Although Bill Gross has questioned why anyone would want to trade US equities when their price depends upon whether POTUS "had a good night's sleep", veteran traders insist this is a great time to be alive. 

"Insane markets are the reason you got into this business," wrote Donnelly. If you're flagging already, you should probably think about a different career, says Wainer after his espressos: "Burnout…? It’s been 4 days !!!" If you're already tired and exhausted, he suggests something else: "Civil service perhaps or knitting."

And yet not everyone is thriving. In hedge funds, at least, there are rumours of pods blowing up and people far exceeding their drawdown limits. One portfolio manager described the market as "mental." Another said risk was being unwound at a ferocious rate earlier this week. "A lot of people are going to be losing their jobs."

If you get the tap on the shoulder, traders who've been there advise serenity. "You are told to cut risk, don’t argue against it," says Matthias Schwartz, the former head of EMEA credit trading at Bank of America. "- It's not your capital - to argue will not help you keep your job." If you can stay cool and rational, you have more chance of remaining employed than if you object to having your risk cut at what might seem (and often is) the wrong moment, says Schwartz.  "Being proactive and putting risk management above all else is key." 

If you can get it right, though, all experienced traders say that periods like this will define your career. You need to avoid trading like it's the end of the world, says Wainer. The question is never how far down the markets have fallen, but what they're going to do next and the appropriate action to take. "Do banks even take risk any more, or is it just arbitraging client flow? Who is left to teach these traders anything?" he laments.

Most of all, look after your body and your mind. Don't drink. Don't do drugs. "Get up, work out and get on with it," says Wainer. Espressos are as far as it goes. 

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