London credit traders lament tragic death of ex-Barclays colleague
Senior credit traders in London are mourning the death of 44-year-old Adam Robinson, a former credit trader who died with his wife and two children, their nanny and two friends, in the Learjet that was flying from Austin Texas to the Bahamas on November 1st.
Robinson, who was American, worked in London for Barclays following the financial crisis after beginning his career at Lehman Brothers in NYC. He founded an email marketing company in 2012 and achieved an "eight figure exit" in 2021 according to his LinkedIn profile. He'd latterly been working on another technology-based marketing company and on APIs offering contact data to AI agents.
Many of the thousand plus people mourning Robinson on LinkedIn are fellow tech entrepreneurs, who describe him as a legend. "You built great products, mad respect," says one. Former Barclays London colleagues tell us they are shocked and saddened by his passing too. "He was just a good guy, well liked by everyone. I never heard a bad word said about him," one tells us.
Speaking on the ProfitLed podcast only last week, Robinson said he spent 10 years as a CDS trader and made millions of dollars in two consecutive years in his 20s. He moved to London after the financial crisis, but things had changed: "My boss thought Europe was going to come unwound... Sent a bunch of people over there. Everyone shorted everything. Nobody made money. He gave everyone donuts. Zero zero bonuses."
Robinson was fired and moved back to live with a girlfriend in New York, but she broke up with him. He said he then had an "indescribably horrible" identity crisis. "[I’d] never experienced depression before in my life... I remember this one girl telling me, ‘Just make it through today.’ And I was like, ‘I don’t know how.’ Not that I was suicidal, it was just so painful to experience that loss of identity.”
At that point, Robinson told the podcast that he decided to leave trading and to build companies outside of financial services. He said that people who leave finance "have an enormous amount of confidence," but that it's very often misplaced. "When your value system has been for 10 years [that] your value is the money that you make, and you make a lot of money, you’re like, ‘Well, I can just do anything.’ And that’s probably true, but it’s probably true over a decade, and you think it’s true over six months."
Had he not made millions early in his career, Robinson said he may have stayed in trading. But he also said that the industry can be a trap. "You’re always looking at your boss and then your boss’s boss and trying to extrapolate: ‘Wow, if I just hang around, I’m going to have that cool apartment and buy that Hamptons house.’ That’s what the whole thing is.”
Another of Robinson's former trading colleagues tells us: "He was a great guy who achieved incredible success after Wall Street, but really cared about sharing how he did it and showing other people how they could do it too." The last part is "really unusual," he added.
RIP.
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