In the world of trading, loss has a number attached to it.
A position falls. A market turns. A decision goes wrong. The damage can be calculated, reviewed and eventually placed into perspective.
For Chris Cathey, author of Bulls, Bears and Pigs: Trading, Grief and Reinvention, loss once belonged to that world of numbers, probabilities and risk.
Then life showed him a kind of loss that could not be measured at all.
Cathey spent years working in finance, including thirteen years as a trader at Goldman Sachs. His career demanded confidence, discipline, quick thinking and the ability to make decisions when markets were uncertain. He understood that losses were part of the business. What mattered was how you responded to them.
But personal grief does not behave like a market.
When Numbers Stop Meaning Anything
Cathey’s journey had already been remarkable.
Raised in a working-class environment in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, he went on to study at the University of Cambridge, complete a PhD in Chemistry and eventually build a successful career in international finance.
The trading floor became a place where he learned about risk, ambition, pressure and human behavior.
Success could be measured in performance.
Then his wife, Claire, died from breast cancer.
Cathey was left raising four children as a single father and suddenly the language he had spent years using to understand risk and loss became inadequate.
There was no number that could represent what had disappeared.
No strategy could reverse it.
No amount of professional success could make the loss smaller.
The Difference Between Losing Money and Losing a Future
One of the most powerful ideas running through Bulls, Bears and Pigs is the difference between financial loss and personal loss.
In trading, even a painful setback belongs to a system. Markets continue. New opportunities appear. Positions change.
Grief is different because it reaches into identity, relationships, routines and the future a person thought they were going to have.
Cathey did not simply have to process his own loss. He also had four children who had lost their mother.
That responsibility changed everything.
His life gradually moved away from the priorities that had once dominated it. He returned to Newcastle and focused on his family, beginning a process of rebuilding and reinvention.
A Memoir About Value
That is why Bulls, Bears and Pigs is much more than a book about Goldman Sachs or financial markets.
Yes, readers get an insider’s perspective on trading culture, market events, risk-taking, competition and professional ambition.
But beneath all of that is a much bigger question:
How do we decide what is truly valuable?
A successful career can be important. Money can provide security and opportunity. Achievement can open doors.
But some things cannot be priced.
Love cannot.
Time cannot.
A family cannot.
And the loss of someone central to your life cannot be entered into a spreadsheet.
Chris Cathey spent years understanding markets where everything seemed to have a value.
Life eventually taught him that the most important things often do not.
Bulls, Bears and Pigs: Trading, Grief and Reinvention is the story of what happens when professional success meets personal tragedy and how one man began building a new life after losing the future he thought he knew.
Discover the full story in Bulls, Bears and Pigs by Chris Cathey.
Available on Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0GX34WRSD/
