A day in the glamorous life of a day trader.

He sits at his desk in his boxer shorts. He scratches his three days of beard growth and chews on the remnants of a half eaten pizza from the night before (it was Champions League night) and slurps on his third coffee of the morning. The blinds of the sitting room to his riverside apartment are blocking out the midday sunlight.

He stares at the computer screen. The computer screen stares right back.

“Are you feeling lucky today kid?”, he imagines the screen to taunt back at him.

Gordon had obviously forgotten about the plan. The plan was that I would call round on my bike, late morning, and that we would head for Camden Town, by cycling all the way along the Regent’s Canal, starting out at the Limehouse basin.

If you have never done it, then I urge you to down tools and do so. The best things in life are most definitely free, and this is free. A fresh crisp clear day. The perfect day to be self employed, be that a market trader, a freelance writer or an actor that is ‘between roles’.

The free days where your decision to ‘go it alone’ made it all worth while, when the paper pushers in the city could look longingly out from their water coolers in their steel faceless buildings at us bohemians trundling by with our pushbikes and packed lunches - who have nothing, but yet who have everything.

You cycle past locks, under bridges, through parks, through the many and varied nuanced styles of each zone or borough along the canal. And always a friendly face: the students from Queen Mary University lounging out on the grass between lectures, the guys fishing for perch on the canal banks, the folk who actually live permanently on barges hanging out some washing to dry, the slightly more uptempo buzz in Angel and Islington and then the final destination of Camden Lock and Market - the undisputed capital of Chill.

“Hang on a second”, said Gordon. Let me just put this trade on and I’ll be right with you.

I stood looking on from the doorway petrified.

“I saw a programme on CNBC yesterday that reckons Biotech is the next bubble. So I’m gonna wade into some Biotech mate. Just waiting to get ‘filled‘. I’m gonna be all over this bubble”.

“Oh yeah and it just flashed on the screens (at 12.05pm) that the recent market concerns on the Greek Crisis are beginning to fade, so I’m just increasing my ‘market long’ position as well, so gimme a sec mate”.

Gordon did not appear to have a sound investment thesis or rationale behind his actions - it was more of a ‘man off the telly reckons’- trading strategy. He had dilating pupils, I searched but could not find, for any signs of cool, calm or collected. I drew blanks.

This was most certainly not the Warren Buffet school of investing.

If this was the degree of thought that Gordon was placing into the active trading and speculation of his hard earned money then it seemed to me that he was no better off than the living dead who inhabit the local bookies, backing and laying to their heart’s content on a couple of donkeys in Doncaster, and even worse, on virtual horse races.

As it turned out, it was no longer Gordon’s hard earned money that he was frittering away. That had run out long ago. Quite disturbingly, a financial institution had advanced him a small amount of funds with which he could carry on living the dream.

12.48pm I’m still standing in the doorway. It suddenly flashes on Gordon’s screen:

“Renewed concerns on the Greek situation signals heavy selling in stock markets”. An about turn in the market view in less than one hour. Nothing new there. It may as well be Hello magazine.

The Biotech bubble could wait, there was his ‘long position’ to rescue.

I left Gordon to his slings and arrows as I continued on to the Regents Canal, on a mountain bike, with a packed lunch in my knapsack.

At the end of a rewarding day, of sunlight, of fresh air and exercise, spent chilling in Camden Lock, and sitting in one of the many free WiFi zones, slurping on a few fresh coffees, getting through some work in quite inspirational surroundings, I reckon I spent approximately £7 pounds in my whole fulfilling day.

Meanwhile, at the end of a quite trying day, Gordon had remained indoors for the duration, frantically and stubbornly chasing losses, and attempting to try to trade his way back to a profitable position.

He saw no sunlight, he got no fresh air. He saw no other human being, apart from myself earlier that day. By night’s end, Gordon had ‘spent’ £6,300 of money which technically was not his, and he did not even have the pleasure of getting something in return.

That was a couple of weeks ago. Gordon is now looking for cheaper state-assisted lodgings. And he is no longer a day trader as his ‘account’ has been frozen.

I don’t need to tell you that Gordon was foolish, that you should never mess around with something you don’t fully understand, and that you should most certainly never gamble with money you do not have.

It is perfectly fine trading the financial markets whilst being employed by an investment bank. This bank will (ideally) have the necessary risk controls, excellent research to aid instantaneous decision making and it will provide you with work colleagues sitting in desks in Tokyo, and New York and London who you can pass your positions to while your time zone sleeps.

It is an entirely a different proposition if you are sitting in your bedsit, where you put on a position, and then in the time it takes you to nip down to the corner shop for the paper and a danish, or worse still in the time it takes to answer a call of nature…you can lose the shirt off your back and with no way of salvaging a situation that his been deftly engineered out of nothing more than stupidity.

I have a few simple rules of thumb that I try to consistently adopt in my own financial comings and goings.

Never spend more money than you have.

Never buy something that eats while you sleep.

If I ever have spare cash, I never invest more than 5% of it in equities, especially considering the current delicate environment.

Always invest with the long term view. When Warren Buffet buys a share at 9am on a Tuesday, I very much doubt he intends to sell it at a 5% profit before Countdown starts at 4pm on the same day.

He might look for it’s growth potential, its underlying business, what kind of dividend it pays, it’s underlying currency, it’s takeover prospects, is it the rising star of its sector or industry?

He certainly doesn’t flick a coin and wonder which is going to be the next bubble.

Thanks for reading folks and as always, your comments are most welcome.