When I was growing up, my dream was always to follow in my father’s footsteps. He was a well-respected high-ranking engineer in the civil service, which inspired me to aim for a career within the same field. When I enrolled in Singapore Polytechnic at 17, my goal was to eventually become an electrical engineer.

But it didn’t work out that way. Although I excelled in mathematics and computer-related subjects such as Fortran programming, other subjects did not ignite my passions. I failed my first year and had to repeat it. Then I failed it again, and had to repeat it a second time. Then I failed my second year, and had to repeat that, too. I had run out of time – the school said I only had five years to complete the course. I was forced to drop out.

I was aimless and dreamless. The one thing I had always thought I would do was no longer an option. I went to work making fries at McDonald’s! I had no plan, until one day I answered an ad in the newspaper that said “make thousands of dollars a day as a commodities trader”. I went to an office in Tanjong Pagar, deposited SGD5,000 and lo and behold, I was a commodities trader!

That ad changed my life. I discovered I loved the thrill of the trading floor. But it wasn’t without setbacks. My mum never got back that first SGD5,000 she lent me, but I was committed and I saw it as paying school fees. I had to learn, and what better way to learn than to open an account and start trading from it?

I have fond memories of my time on the trading floor in the early 1990s. It was 600 of us watching one ticking computer, and every time it ticked, we would roll up our graph paper and mark ‘X’s and ‘O’s. After six to nine hours we would chart our graphs and do our analyses. If I went to the toilet, there would be a gap in my graph and no one would help me! So after a while, I learned to team up with others and collaborate.

I vividly remember one time, then-President of the United States George H. W. Bush made a comment that made the market react by 40 points. That was so exciting to me, because it meant that if your timing was right, you could increase your capital by 40 to 50 percent in just one trade within a few minutes. Can you imagine? It made me realise that if I could learn this and master it, it could really make me a lot of money.

Pretty soon, I was hooked. I learned that I thrive on volatility, because where there is volatility, there are opportunities. I realised that that old dream of mine, to be an engineer, would have never been enough for me. I was always a trader at heart. I would eventually go on to trade part-time for 22 years and then become a full-time trader in 2012. But I would never have discovered my talent and passion without being open to trying something I knew nothing about, being flexible and being willing to learn. Sometimes, you have to be willing to let go of old dreams to make way for better ones.

Authored by Kenneth Kam
Produced by Callio Media