When I was a child I lived in a normal house, my mother was a librarian and my father drove his own cab.

 We were a normal family, with a normal life.

My father began to have a steady client, a Wall Street Stockbroker who was obsessed with gold.

On every drive through the streets of Manhattan, he would talk to my father about the gold market and try to convince him over and over again that he should buy too.

His insistence was so great that he finally convinced him.

My father began to buy one ounce a week, because one of the things that the stockbroker taught him was that he had to have a constant investment plan in order for it to pay off.

In this way he accumulated an interesting amount of gold, which he bought at $35 dollars an ounce. But, when the price of gold was released, each ounce cost $800 dollars.

From $35 to $800!

At that moment our life went Boom! We changed our house, our neighborhood, our school, where we shopped, what was served at our table….

Everything changed.

But, although my father had an interest in the financial markets and tried to play, he didn’t have the knowledge or training. He wanted to repeat his gold feat, but that was just a stroke of luck.

From that experience I learned many things, but today I will share with you just three:

• • • That to be successful at something you need to have the right knowledge, because lucky breaks are rare and not repeated.
    • That one decision can impact your life and give you new opportunities.
    • And that what you do together with your children, sows a seed in them that lasts and grows in ways that many times you cannot foresee.

This last I tell you because I owe it to my father that I made it to Trading.

 His gold play was not the only thing.

 Every Friday night at 8 p.m., my father would turn on the television and I would sit next to him and watch “Wall Street Week with Louis Rukeyser” together.

This was an essential program for traders and fund managers of the time, in which they interviewed the brightest minds on Wall Street, with the intention of giving insight into “the secrets” of the stock market and the economy.

It was there, in the living room, sitting next to my father in front of the TV, that I made the firm decision to start trading.

 If it weren’t for him, I wouldn’t have started down this path. Or maybe I would have. But much, much later.