Yen-quake

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My internal dialogue in early March 2011:

What’s my costume going to be for sevens this year?

Can my body handle another back-to-back, Taiwan Spring Scream?^[1]

Back to reality. I’m sitting at my desk at Deutsche Bank in Hong Kong’s ICC tower, market making a bunch of ETFs on the Hong Kong and Singapore stock exchanges. I hear someone shout across the floor that there has been a mega earthquake in Japan. Immediately, the tv’s in the office switch to a live feed from the Tokyo office, and it’s shaking. Then we turn on some news channel and witness the tsunami roll tide roll through northeast Honshu live. It’s fucking INSANE!. And to top it all off, Fukushima is smoldering. We would find out later; the nuclear fallout almost caused the evacuation of Tokyo.

The Nikkei immediately dives and is down almost 20% by mid-morning. At the same time, dollar-yen ricochets lower towards 70, the yen trades at one of the strongest levels in post-WW2 history. I fucking hate a strong yen. Last winter I discovered Niseko but it was crushingly expensive at 80 dollar-yen. It didn’t help that my boy’s girlfriend, who is a tycoon’s kid, booked all the restaurants. She had no concept of money, and we went to every tasting menu in town. I never made that mistake again. In subsequent years, I slept at the hostel and ate only ramen in bodybuilder sized quantities. Back to trading.