When I was fourteen, my parents decided to move our family to the United States. My parents were Jewish refugees from Poland who, after surviving the war in Uzbekistan, met and married in France in 1948. Two years later they followed my father's side of the family to Argentina and I was born there in 1951. Unfortunately, they never were happy there and emigration was something always considered as I was growing up.

Finally in 1966 we moved to the States. One week after arriving in New York, I found myself in White Plains High School, allowed to skip grade. Although at first I could not speak English, I never felt disadvantaged. Going to school in the U.S. was a big adventure. My all-boys education in Buenos Aires had been rigorous, demanding, with very rigid rules that included a strict dress code and even regular checks on the length of one's hair. To boot, the physical state of the school was terrible (no heat in the winter).

At White Plains High School, you could wear whatever you wanted to wear. The school was beautiful, lots of glass, an indoor swimming pool, a trampoline in the gym, books provided free of charge, heat and air conditioning that made it unnecessary to wear a coat indoors, and above all there were girls, they were everywhere! Not being able to speak the language was beside the point—WPHS was like Disneyland! Within a year I was fluent in English, and I ended graduating in the top quintile of my class.

When I was a senior, the head of the guidance department said to me (probably because I was a recent immigrant), "Maybe you should consider attending the local community college after graduation." "Why not MIT," I said. So we settled on Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and Carnegie Mellon. I was accepted to both and chose RPI because it was closer to home.

The transition to college proved more difficult than the transition from to Argentina to WPHS. My high school girlfriend had broken up with me and I did not like either RPI or Troy, NY. I also struggled mightily with first semester physics. Although I had gotten an A in high school physics, my first college course in physics didn't click and my final grade was an F. Crestfallen, I pleaded with my professor to give me a D-minus so I could at least move on. He did not relent and I had to take the course over again. Failing Physics 1 taught me a valuable lesson, however—that sometimes when things are not going your way, you have to step back before moving forward again. Maybe my professor understood this, that giving me a D-minus instead of an F would mean that I would move forward with a weak foundation. The second time around Physics 1 clicked into place effortlessly. My new final grade was an A, which was followed by A's in Physics 2 and Physics 3.

I graduated with a BS in Structural Engineering in 1973 and joined a large building construction management firm in New York City. I loved buildings and thought about studying architecture at the graduate level. But I found the entry-level positions not challenging and concluded that the professional life of an average architect was not that rewarding.

I still felt that my engineering education was incomplete, however, and although I suspected that I would not end up being a professional engineer, I wanted to complete my education. I resigned from my construction job and enrolled full time in the graduate program in engineering at Columbia University. I received a Master's degree in structural engineering about a year later. While at Columbia I had the opportunity to take a couple of courses at the Columbia Business School. I found the business school environment invigorating. Thus, my MS in engineering was followed by an MBA from the Columbia Business School, and that degree led to my lifelong career at Mobil Oil and then ExxonMobil.

While my professional education followed a well-defined and successful path, my parents were not as fortunate in their professional pursuits. My father had been studying to be an engineer, and my mother was preparing to attend medical school when World War II upended their lives in ways that none of us can fully imagine. Because it was very difficult for Jews to attend university in Poland, my grandparents had sent my father to study engineering In France. My mother started her medical education in Uzbekistan after the war started. Both educations were cut short by the war, and the lack of stability made it impossible to resume after the war ended.

Growing up in Argentina, my family and I would always go on summer vacations. Most years vacation planning was haphazard. The only decision made was whether we would head north to the mountains or south to the beaches. When we stopped for the night, it was my job to go into the hotel and see if they had a room available—and then negotiate the rate. I was just a kid, maybe 10-12 years old. My sister would never get out of the car and do that. She would have been too embarrassed. But to me, embarrassment was not part of the equation, embarrassment was the other person's problem! Being pushy and not embarrassing easily is still part of my make-up. My strategy is straightforward: make the other person uncomfortable enough so they give you what you want just to get rid of you!

It's a strategy that has served me well, be it to get a better hotel room (when you check in, they always offer you the worst room first) or to gain admission to top schools, be they undergraduate or graduate. For me nothing came easily. Every opportunity needed "development."

As graduation from Columbia Business School approached it was time to start interviewing with companies that came to campus to recruit.  Mobil Oil was a company that I was interested in working for. Unfortunately, so were many of my classmates. As a result, the available on-campus interview slots were committed before I had a chance to sign up. But not being someone who's easily dissuaded, I contacted the recruitment office at Mobil's New York corporate headquarters and asked if I could come and see them. That led to a full day of interviews and a job offer, and my 37-year career at Mobil/ExxonMobil.

I was a perfect hire for them. Mobil was interested in recruiting MBAs from top schools who had a technical undergraduate degree. As part of their training program, Mobil would bring the new recruits into their global supply and distribution group, a group responsible for distributing its crude oil as well as its refined products to its vast global system. It was a complex allocation process involving those producing the crude oil, those that refined it, those responsible for shipping the oil and refined products globally to meet marketing demands, and those that analyzed the significant tax implications of all of our decisions. New hires would come in and rotate among the various desks and receive promotions (or not) as they progressed up the ladder of increased responsibility. I succeeded in staying on the prescribed path and enjoyed my work. I was surrounded by very intelligent colleagues but still did not feel like I had yet come into my own at the Corporation. That came six years later, when I was promoted into the then nascent world of international oil trading. That's where I found myself.

Trading fit my intellect, my temperament and my interests. It was also an outlet for my creativity.  Trading was different from the global supply and distribution group where everyone's performance was compared to everyone else's as a measure of success. A good trader is measured by his or her abilities versus the market not versus their colleagues. I was finally doing something I wanted to do. Work stopped being work. From then on, my goal, was to increase my knowledge and preserve the professional freedom that trading afforded both inside and outside the corporation.

After about a year I was asked to consider moving to London to trade crude oil out of that office. I had not known that when I was brought into trading the goal was to relocate me to London. Foreign assignments were generally considered plum positions, especially in places like London. But the timing was wrong. My daughter had been recently born, and I felt very uncomfortable leaving my mother alone. She had had a very difficult life; a World War II survivor, a widow at a relatively young age, someone with limited financial means and with very few friends to lean on. We had also just moved into our first house (the first house I had ever lived in). Protecting my family's happiness was more important to me than protecting my current assignment so I turned down the offer. At that point I thought my trading career was over.

Fortunately, my trading carer did not end. I had to leave crude oil trading and move to trading refined products (gasoline, diesel, and jet fuel) internationally. Nominally, trading products was considered less prestigious than trading crude oil. But it turned out to be a far more interesting assignment and one where I could contribute more than I did as a new trader in the crude oil group.

What seemed like punishment turned out to be an asset. One of my first assignments in the crude oil trading group was to develop the mechanisms needed to trade in oil futures, a new market activity and certainly a very new activity for Mobil. Moving over to the products trading group, I brought with me a skill that they did not have before. To my advantage, my new job was poorly structured, with limited fixed responsibilities.  To me, that represented an opportunity to expand my field of action. Not having fixed responsibilities gave me the room to experiment. I developed a great deal of autonomy, which in a big corporation like Mobil was hard to come by.

Although the profits from trading crude oil were bigger, trading refined products was much more nuanced and complex. Those that were good at it had to be nonlinear thinkers, and for someone who grew up in Argentina, nonlinear thinking was a way of life!

Unlike other segments of the oil business where companies compete aggressively, the oil trading business was different because other oil companies and trading houses were both customers as well as competitors. No oil company was perfectly integrated. Until the mid-eighties, oil companies optimized their crude oil and refined product imbalances internally (that was the responsibility of the group I was assigned to when I first joined the company). With the advent of futures markets and other trading mechanisms, it became much easier and profitable to optimize one's system by selling what you did not need and buying what you needed, be it crude oil or refined products. With the increase in trading, a trading community developed, where one got to know most of the players in your region as they were the counterparties in this global optimization game.

In 1990 Iraq invaded Kuwait. The multinational Desert Shield coalition was put together by the U.S. and staged in Saudi Arabia. As the buildup of Desert Shield started, I learned from our Abu Dhabi trading office that the Saudis were charged with providing the necessary diesel and jet fuel to support the military operation. Since the Saudis had crude oil but not the required products, I also learned that they would need to come into the market to purchase these shortfalls. I immediately contacted the Saudi arm charged with providing the fuels and confirmed their need. 

I then asked our marine department to obtain shipping options to transport the fuel from the U.S. Atlantic basin (at the time, the cheapest source for this material) to Saudi Arabia. However, I knew that our company did not have either the required qualities or the ability to load the large vessels that we were about to commit to use. Although Mobil did not have the fuel, I knew who did. I contacted the trader at the other company and committed to purchase the required products which I then offered to the Saudis. They accepted that offer and several subsequent ones that I made to them. In the end, it was a very big deal, all concluded in a very short time.

Doing deals like that, each one unique, was what made every day an adventure. When you came into the office, you never knew what opportunities the new day would present. For all the bureaucracy that exists at large corporations, up to that point Mobil's gestalt was unique. The company generally did not box its people in. It was always said that a job was what you made of it, and that is what I did. I never depended on other people to tell me what to do. I set my own goal—probably harder goals than what would have been set for me. Luckily, I never received push-back from management (although I am sure that I annoyed them from time to time). 

That Saudi Arabia transaction greatly elevated my internal reputation as an effective and agile trader. Suddenly, I became a person of substance. My management looked at me differently, like "this guy knows what he's doing."

As a result, I had I became more outspoken about my market views, which may or may not have fit the consensus. I was known as the contrarian thinker.  I just thought differently from everyone else. If somebody was approaching a problem from the left, I may approach it from the right. I always believed that one must approach problems without preconditions or constraints. Constraints can always be added later. (Unfortunately, quite often people self-constrain.) Recently I talked to someone who I worked with at ExxonMobil and who has since left the company. He was one of my mentees. He said that he really appreciated having worked with me because I taught him how to think differently. I often wondered why my approach was different. I used to think that it may have been my combination of a rigorous engineering training and growing up in Argentina, an anarchic society. In the end, after much reflection, I concluded that it was just simply the way I am wired.

Thereafter, my responsibilities increased, I was assigned to lead various global trading teams.

Although I successfully established myself, I never forgot my father's experience. After being a successful small business owner in Argentina, he was never able to reestablish himself in the U.S. I was very aware of how tough it had been for him, often unemployed for long periods of time and then losing his health. He did not have a shiny new high school to help him transition from one country to the other. He had been a manufacturer of sweaters in Argentina, but by the time we landed in New York, the knitting industry was moving out of New York, first to the south and then overseas. Due to no fault of his own, he was caught in a global trend but one that he did not fully recognize at the time.

In spite of his hardships, he never complained about making the move at age 48 to the U.S. A news junkie, he appreciated living in a fully established democracy. And although he was unable to realize his ambitions, my sister and I certainly benefited from his bold decision to emigrate to the States.

By the middle '90s, the Mobil corporate environment started to change. Possibly as a result of senior management changes and a new management trying to put their own stamp on the organization, or maybe because senior management was not willing to make necessary organizational changes on their own. Regardless of the reason, the dreaded consultants were brought in, people who knew nothing telling people who knew something how to build their business.

It was a brutal endeavor: 70 percent of the trading organization was demoted and I lost managers who had not only been supportive but who had also had become my friends. Unfortunately, they were replaced by people outside our line of business who were unfamiliar with trading.

Somehow, I escaped demotions and was able to maintain my rank, but not my job. I was moved to a new position to lead a group responsible for aggregating all futures trading activity. The "group" consisted of me and a junior colleague who had come from a public relations function and had no trading experience in either the supply of oil or the trading of oil. Senior management was equally inexperienced, as they had come from the marketing side of the business (the mindset of a marketer is anathema to that of a trader). Just as I was molding my new position into a coherent function, I was moved, again by another reorganization (the destructive earthquake followed by the destructive aftershock).

My new job was to be part of a newly created Business Development group. A separate business development function within a trading function was a job I did not think should exist.  Good traders are always developing new business as part of their search for trading profits and are never short of ideas.

What made matters worse was that I had a very difficult boss who was not friendly toward me. He would call me into his office, tell me that he wanted results that were nonsensical ("there is gold in them hills" and we need to go after "them low hanging fruits" were his favorite expressions). When I disagreed with some of his suggestions (why don't we try B instead of A), it only increased his ire toward me (possibly because when he offered me the job to join his group, he correctly sensed my reluctance to take it). On a couple of occasions, I thought he was going to fire me.

Luckily, I was not there for very long. He moved on, I was let out of purgatory, back into a trading function, life started to look good again. But again, not for long. In 2000 Exxon bought Mobil, a tectonic shift in culture and the way business was done. Where there was freedom at Mobil, there was very little at ExxonMobil. Exxon had lots of rules and they were very strict.

In the merger process I lost two levels and went from being part of the executive pool to being a senior professional. To add insult to injury, I also lost about half of my overall compensation (no bonuses at ExxonMobil).

At the time of the merger, I could have left with a two-year salary payout but with severely reduced retirement benefits. You had to be 50 to maintain the Mobil early retirement benefits, but I was only 48, the same age my father was when he emigrated from Argentina (all my colleagues who were 50 or older left the company). Since the only attractive opportunities outside the company were in Houston, and as a family we were not ready to move there, I stayed on. I concluded that the decision to leave Mobil should not be driven by short-term financial benefits. I put my pride on hold and became a loyal ExxonMobil employee.

At Mobil I had had the freedom to pursue whatever I thought interesting. I always expanded the scope of my given job and put an entrepreneurial spin on it. Unlike some of my colleagues, my tendency was to operate "out of the box."

But Mobil Oil's culture was taken over by Exxon's culture. Where Mobil's culture was freewheeling and welcomed innovation, Exxon was rigid, rule-bound and very risk-averse. You didn't get punished for not doing something; but you got punished for doing something that was not expected. In a peculiar way, working at ExxonMobil was easier because there was always a reason not to do something.

Even though I was much more restricted at ExxonMobil, I still kept trying to do my own thing—I still developed trading-related businesses. I was assigned to the trading group that supported Exxon's (now ExxonMobil's) extensive marketing presence in Latin America. I suspect that I was assigned to that group because I spoke Spanish, a bit discriminatory since my skillset would have been more beneficial to the new corporation had I been assigned elsewhere.

It was an easy job that left me with time to again expand my activities. I did so by focusing on the growing business of refined-products exports from the U.S. to Latin America and Europe, and by extension on exports from those locations back to the U.S. Where Exxon had been focused on supplies only to affiliated companies, I focused on business with third parties. I developed a very big diesel and gasoline export business to Mexico, as well as diesel exports to Europe to meet that region's natural shortfall. ExxonMobil had a very large refining system in the U.S. with access to the waterborne export market. The trick was to get the refining system to focus on opportunities outside the local market that yielded higher margins. As the exports grew, I was again tapped to lead interregional teams focused on growing the export/import business. The only restriction was that a barrel of refined products had to originate or end up in an affiliated company. Unlike Mobil, at ExxonMobil no speculative trading either in the physical or futures market was allowed. But the ExxonMobil system was so large that I had plenty to do regardless.

As time went by, ExxonMobil started to exit the Latin America market but my other activities kept growing so I stayed very engaged. My management also left me alone because I was usually ahead of the curve in promoting and expanding our business. I had been concerned that as I got older the younger people would catch up to me, I thought I would lose my edge. Instead, I kept gaining ground. The young people came to me for advice.

At ExxonMobil you had to be in the top quartile to move up the organization or to get above- average raises. For reasons that had nothing to do with my performance but probably a lot to do with my age, my ranking always seemed to be top quintile minus one. But I enjoyed what I was doing, and I never let my self-worth be determined by the organization or my position within it. I measured my performance by my own internal standards—intellectual, ethical, and financial.

Although I never did leave the safety of the large corporation, I was always able to stay connected with the global trading community. They became my friends, many of which I still stay in contact with to this day, eight years after retirement.

It was outside the ExxonMobil envelope that I found the people I admired and wanted to emulate. Those that I thought were very clear and strategic thinkers. I observed what they did and tried to understand their mindset.

For 32 of my 37 years at Mobil and then ExxonMobil, I had essentially the same job. But as the world changed, I kept learning, and I kept adapting.  The title of my job may not have changed much but the job changed every day.

I retired in 2015 after the company decided to close its offices in Fairfax, Virginia, which had been Mobil's corporate headquarters, and consolidate its operations in Houston, Texas. Already past my retirement age I decided not to join them.

In an effort to quantify my experience for this article, I recently asked a friend who was also an oil trader at a major oil company what he thought my strengths were. He said, "You were able to do something that's difficult to do a large corporation. You forged your own path, and did what you wanted to do." I guess he got it spot on.

On my last day, my wife and I were on the Houston campus saying goodbye to friends. We were waiting to exit and there were two young men waiting behind us. I did not know who they were but both my wife and I overheard one saying to the other, "Do you know who that guy ahead of us is? That's Natalio Feldman, and he is a legend!"

Not a bad exit.