Day One Trader: A Liffe Story

This is a book about the journey in LIFFE by a fanatical Hammers fan. In fact, John Sussex was consider part of the first pioneer group in LIFFE... As such, my first impression was: Hmm, this must be an interesting story...although we Gunners basically hate Hammers, LOL.

After finishing the whole book, I tend to view the whole journey by the author into two separated part.. The first major part is all about the life in LIFFE floor trading. Meanwhile, the second part focuses on the author's ups and downs throughout his career... End up; I think it is quite a dull book for the first part of John Sussex's journey. Perhaps, a trader's life (especially the floor trader?) is indeed as dull as described in the book. Those who were involved in day one operations of LIFFE perhaps will love the first part stories of this book. Outsiders like us however may not understand the interesting part of what is being written by the author. Furthermore, the facts that LIFFE floor was killed off by technology in the late nineties indirectly reduced the academical part in this book. History and evolution are important. However, evolution creates improvement and improvement equals to significant substitution on certain things. At the end, it is more of a story in the past. Since technology took over, the significance of events in this first part of this book reduce dramatically too.

How about the second part? "Thrilling"... I think that is the best word to describe it. It all started with one cruel character~ Stephen Humphries who bumped into the author's life accidentally. The mess and damages created by him is the climax of the whole story. I felt sorry for John Sussex as his downfall was not really due to his personal mistake. It was the third party who created the havoc even though John Sussex could have prevented it in the first place... What a story it turned out to be... 

Well, like I mentioned above, the book is basically divided into two parts. The first major part seems a bit dull to me even though I truly enjoyed the second part. Overall, this is a nice book to read on. At least, it is a relaxing story and not as academic as represent by other similar books. Since I used to judge a book from what I gain after I read, this book obviously fell below my expectations. Nothing much was gained as I think the story told was in fact nothing new to me. Having said that, I am rating this book at 4/10. Not a bad book... but surely not the best book to explore...