INTERVIEW: All in a day's work for a stock trader.

Muhammad Zubair Ellahi hardly looks the part he's been playing for 30 years.

Instead of sitting across an expensively dressed, self-important smooth-talker, I found myself speaking to a man wearing a regular blue checked shirt and worn-out pants with thickets of undyed hair on his head. He was devoid of the superstar airs that the public associates with the cut-throat world of high-flying finance professionals.

Mr Ellahi is a stock trader. His job inAAvolves studying company financials, sniffing around for market-moving information, ringing up clients and telling them to buy or sell stocks to make a profit on their investments.

He's stuck around for 30 years in a line of work that's highly competitive. Hardly a few thousand professionals help hundreds of thousands of investors buy and sell shares worth roughly Rs25 billion a day on the country's only stock exchange.

I sat down with him recently to learn what exactly stock traders do and how they do it.

'It's a target-oriented job. A lot depends on one's aptitude. Things look rosy from afar. But very few have what it takes to be a successful trader,' said Mr Ellahi who heads the traders' team at Next Capital and also sits on its board of directors.

'One should be willing to spend countless hours trying to understand the investing landscape and learn the skill. It's not a nine-to-five job. It's like running your own business.'

Trading is a high-burnout profession. Bad traders don't survive. Too many professions allow their members to separate results from efforts. From bureaucrats and economists to academics and journalists, incompetent people can fake competence for years and come out on top. But it's impossible to separate labour from the fruits of labour in case of a trader. Their performance is measured against benchmarks for every single trade on monthly, quarterly and yearly bases. What they deliver has a direct and observable bearing on not only their client's portfolio but also their employer's income.

Like your own business

A young trader usually joins a brokerage house on a salary but moves to a salary-plus-commission package in about five years, Mr Ellahi said. Reason? Individual investors are tribal in nature. Their loyalty is with the trader who they speak to every day, not the limited liability company with a broking licence.

'You bring your own clients to the brokerage and manage their portfolios. Whatever brokerage revenue you generate, you share it with the company,' said Mr...