Why Did Nick Kokonas Erase College From His Resume?

Nick Kokonas erased college from his resume so a firm would hire him as a runner at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange for $5 and 25 cents an hour. His goal was to be trading in a year, and the way in was access to the arena.

Orders traveled as paper. Someone called a broker, the broker called the floor, and a runner walked the ticket fast, since running was not allowed, then held it up for a broker who read it, shouted it into the pit, traded it, and handed it back. The loop took about 30 to 40 seconds. He faked the resume in the wrong direction to land the runner job. The floor was about 30 octagons and opaque enough that intelligence did not reveal how it worked. After a short time running they moved him to phone clerk, writing tickets, soulless banal work. After the close he studied open outcry and the hand signals, a path that might reach a pit clerk job at $8 an hour. For six months he searched for an independent trader who could teach him and exploit what he was good at. He had majored in philosophy, studied philosophy of language and logic, and grown up programming, inside an analog market he expected to turn digital.

He wanted the smallest, highest hoops. A big hoop on the ground is easy to jump into. A tiny hoop 30 feet in the air is hard to reach, so fewer people follow, the prize is better, competition is thinner, and the subject is difficult to understand.