from Gergely Orosz | by Gergely Orosz

Every time there’s a market decline or a market up-or-down: I remember how when I worked at JP Morgan, these were times when traffic spiked and we made 5-10x the usual profits. The safest place to be on any volatile market is being the middleman, taking a cut of every buy&sell.

2010 summer Greece was about to get bailed out (or default), JP Morgan predicted volatility for months. So we froze all deploys, did nothing for 4 weeks but refresh daily stats. Clients both won big and went bankrupt: being in the middle was extremely boring, but predictable.

“Why are we not building stuff??” “Because we make far more money by doing thing. Wait and you’ll see.” I was early on in my career at this time that doing nothing drove me crazy. It still would today, even if doing nothing is the business sensible thing to do.