Gold Trading Boot Camp: How to Master the Basics and Become a Successful Commodities Investor

CHAPTER 5

Character

This is the time when a man’s character shows.

Those were the words the head of Commodity Corporation (CC) uttered when Goldman Sachs announced that it had bought out the partnership and would be adjusting salaries and compensation packages, implementing significant cuts in the process. Moreover, the entire Associates Program would be changed, and Goldman would replace seed traders with their own inbred talent to be displaced from Manhattan.

I was shocked and felt as if the rug had been pulled out from under me. With an intense desire to ensure that this would never happen to me again, I chose to leave CC and start my own firm.

In founding Weldon Financial and Weldon’s Money Monitor, I had just undertaken my most challenging task yet—starting my own business. I needed a support net, so I called an old client of Howie Levine’s, a guy I had talked to every day while I was at Lehman Brothers. I called Bill Darby of Darby Trading, former head of commodity trading for ‘Ace’ Israel at ACLI Commodities, one of the most powerful commodity firms in the world during the 1970s and 1980s. From the offices of Darby Trading and AC Israel, in Westchester New York, Weldon Financial began operations in late 1998.

As I laid out my game plan, I decided to work my entire secular macrothematic thought process into the mix to get my business off the ground. It was (and still is) my belief that since the delinking of the U.S. dollar (USD) from gold in 1971, all paper currencies are ...