- •Vernon gant.
- •It was a Tuesday afternoon in February, about four o’clock, sunny and not too cold. I was walking along Twelfth Street at a steady clip, smoking a cigarette,
- •I was certainly sorry to hear this, but at the same time I was having a bit of a problem working up a plausible picture of Melissa living in Mahopac with two kids. As
- •I was puzzled at this. On the walk to the bar, and during Vernon’s search for the right booth, and as we ordered drinks and waited for them to arrive, I’d been
- •I looked over at Vernon as he took another Olympic-sized drag on his ultra-lite, low-tar, menthol cigarette. I tried to think of something to say on the subject of
- •I opened my right hand and held it out. He turned his left hand over and the little white pill fell into my palm.
- •It out. As he was opening the flap and searching for the right button, he said, nodding down at the pill, ‘Let me tell you, Eddie, that thing will solve any problems you’re
- •In. Maxie’s wasn’t my kind of bar, plain and simple, and I decided to finish my drink as quickly as possible and get the hell out of there.
- •I sat staring into my own drink now, wondering what had happened to Melissa. I was wondering how all of that bluster and creative energy of hers could have been
- •I made my way over to the door, and as I was walking out of the bar and on to Sixth Avenue, I thought to myself, well, you certainly haven’t changed.
- •I had registered something almost as soon as I left the bar. It was the merest shift in perception, barely a flicker, but as I walked along the five blocks to Avenue a it
- •I paused for a moment and glanced around the apartment, and over at the window. It was dark and quiet now, or at least as dark and quiet as it can get in a city,
- •I opened the file labelled ‘Intro’. It was the rough draft I’d done for part of the introduction to Turning On, and I stood there in front of the computer, scrolling
- •I stubbed out my cigarette and stared in wonder at the screen for a moment.
- •I was taken aside – over to the kitchen area – and quizzed by one of the uniforms. He took my name, address, phone number and asked me where I worked and
- •I was eventually called back over to Brogan’s desk and asked to read and sign the statement. As I went through it, he sat in silence, playing with a paper clip. Just
- •I couldn’t think of anything to say to that.
- •I found an old briefcase that I sometimes used for work and decided to take it with me, but passed on a pair of black leather gloves that I came across on a shelf in
- •I explained about the status of Turning On, and asked him if he wanted me to send it over.
- •In the marketplace, to keep up with the conglomerates – as Artie Meltzer, k & d’s corporate vice-president, was always saying – the company needed to expand, but
- •I slept five hours on the Thursday night, and quite well too, but on the Friday night it wasn’t so easy. I woke at 3.30 a.M., and lay in bed for about an hour before I
- •I did a series of advanced exercises in one of the books and got them all right. I then dug out an old number of a weekly news magazine I had, Panorama, and as I
- •I paused for a few moments and then took out my address book. I looked up the phone number of an old friend of mine in Bologna and dialled it. I checked the time
- •I spent money on other things, as well, sometimes going into expensive shops and seeking out pretty, elegantly dressed sales assistants, and buying things, randomly –
- •I laughed. ‘I might be.’
- •I’d been to the Met with Chantal a week earlier and had absorbed a good deal of information from catalogues and wall-mounted copy-blocks and I’d also recently
- •I’d get off the phone after one of these sessions with him and feel exhausted, as if I somehow had produced a grandchild, unaided, spawned some distant,
- •I sketched out possible projects. One idea was to withdraw Turning On from Kerr & Dexter and develop it into a full-length study – expand the text and cut back
- •I nodded.
- •I stepped over quickly and stood behind him. On the middle screen, the one he was working at, I could see tightly packed columns of figures and fractions and
- •I did, however, and badly – but I hesitated. I stood in the middle of the room and listened as he told me how he’d left his job as a marketing director to start daytrading
- •I resolved to begin the following morning.
- •I got three or four hours’ sleep that night, and when I woke up – which was pretty suddenly, thanks to a car-alarm going off – it took me quite a while to work out
- •It soon became apparent, however, that something else was at work here. Because – just as on the previous day – whenever I came upon an interesting stock,
- •I hadn’t planned any of this, of course, and as I was doing it I didn’t really believe I’d get away with it either, but the boldest stroke was yet to come. After he’d
- •I paused, and then nodded yes.
- •I’d had with Paul Baxter and Artie Meltzer. I tried to analyse what this was, and could only conclude that maybe a combination of my being enthusiastic and nonjudgemental
- •I lifted my glass. ‘I’ve been doing it at home on my pc, using a software trading package I bought on Forty-seventh Street. I’m up about a quarter of a million in two
- •I had to do a short induction course in the morning. Then I spent most of the early afternoon chatting to some of the other traders and more or less observing the
- •It had been a relatively slow day for me – at least in terms of mental activity and the amount of work I’d done – so when I got home I was feeling pretty restless,
- •It did seem to me to be instinct, though – but informed instinct, instinct based on a huge amount of research, which of course, thanks to mdt-48, was conducted
- •Its susceptibility to predictable metaphor – it was an ocean, a celestial firmament, a numerical representation of the will of God – the stock market was nevertheless
- •I was also aware – not to lose the run of myself here – that whenever an individual is on the receiving end of a revelation like this, addressed to himself alone (and
- •I’d only been trading for little over a week, so naturally I didn’t have much idea about how I was going to pull something like this off, but when I got back to my
- •I remember once being in the West Village with Melissa, for instance, about 1985 or 1986 – in Caffe Vivaldi – when she got up on her high horse about the
- •Van Loon was brash and vulgar and conformed almost exactly to how I would have imagined him from his public profile of a decade before, but the strange thing
- •Van Loon turned to me, like a chat-show host, and said, ‘Eddie?’
- •It was early evening and traffic was heavy, just like on that first evening when I’d come out of the cocktail lounge over on Sixth Avenue. I walked, therefore, rather than
- •I sat at the bar and ordered a Bombay and tonic.
- •Very abrupt and came as I was reaching out to pick up my drink. I’d just made contact with the cold, moist surface of the glass, when suddenly, without any warning or
- •I closed my eyes at that point, but when I opened them a second later I was moving across a crowded dance floor – pushing past people, elbowing them, snarling at
- •I’d read a profile of them in Vanity Fair.
- •I kept staring at her, but in the next moment she seemed to be in the middle of a sentence to someone else.
- •I waited in the reception area for nearly half an hour, staring at what I took to be an original Goya on a wall opposite where I was sitting. The receptionist was
- •I nodded, therefore, to show him that I did.
- •Van Loon nodded his head slowly at this.
- •I leant backwards a little in my chair, simultaneously glancing over at Van Loon and his friend. Set against the walnut panelling, the two billionaires looked like large,
- •I sat on the couch, in my suit, and waited for more, anything – another bulletin, some footage, analysis. It was as if sitting on the couch with the remote control
- •Vacillated between thinking that maybe I had struck the blow and dismissing the idea as absurd. Towards the end, however – and after I’d taken a top-up of mdt –
- •If Melissa had been drinking earlier on in the day, she seemed subdued now, hungover maybe.
- •I was a dot-com billionaire. The flames were stoked further when I casually shrugged off her suggestion that, given the storm of paperwork required these days to pass
- •I nodded at all of this, as though mentally jotting it down for later scrutiny.
- •I emptied the bottle of its last drop, put the cap back on and threw it into the little basket beside the toilet. Then I had to steel myself against throwing up. I sat on the
- •I nodded.
- •I swallowed again and closed my eyes for a second.
- •I nodded, ‘I’m fine.’
- •I could see that she was puzzled. My story – or what she knew of it so far – obviously made very little sense.
- •I told her I wasn’t sure, but that I’d be ok, that I had quite a few mdt pills left and consequently had plenty of room to manoeuvre. I would cut down gradually
- •In addition to this, the cracks that had been appearing and multiplying since morning were now being prised apart even wider, and left exposed, like open wounds.
- •It was bizarre, and through the band of pain pulsating behind my eyes I had only one thought: mdt-48 was out there in society. Other people were using it in the
- •I took one of the two tiny pills out of the bowl and using a blade divided it neatly in half. I swallowed one of the halves. Then I just sat at the desk, thinking about
- •I slept until nine o’clock on the Monday morning. I had oranges, toast and coffee for breakfast, followed by a couple of cigarettes. Then I had a shower and got
- •I shrugged my shoulders. ‘You can’t get decent help these days.’
- •In this myself, that I was perilously close to eye of the storm.
- •I spent a while studying the screen, and gradually it all came back to me. It wasn’t such a complicated process – but what was complicated, of course, was choosing
- •Involved wasn’t real. Naturally, this storm of activity attracted a lot of attention in the room, and even though my ‘strategy’ was about as unoriginal and mainstream as
- •I’d landed here today on the back of my reputation, of my previous performance, I was now beginning to realize that this time around not only did I not know what I
- •Investors who’d bought on margin and then been annihilated by the big sell-off.
- •Van Loon, and what a curious girl she was. I went online and searched through various newspaper and magazine archives for any references there might be to her. I
- •I wanted to ask him more about Todd and what he’d had to say about dosage – but at the same time I could see that Geisler was concentrating really hard and I
- •I stared at him, nodding my head.
- •I took a tiny plastic container with ten mdt pills in it out of my pocket and gave it to him. He opened it immediately, standing there, and before I could launch into
- •I slipped into an easy routine of supplying him with a dozen tablets each Friday morning, telling myself as I handed them over that I’d address the issue before the next
- •I seemed to be doing a lot of that these days.
- •I should have expected trouble, of course, but I hadn’t been letting myself think about it.
- •I said I had some information about Deke Tauber that might be of interest to him, but that I was looking for some information in return. He was cagey at first, but
- •Information I had – which meant that by the time I started asking him questions, I had pretty much won him over.
- •I took an occasional sidelong glance at Kenny Sanchez as he spoke. He was articulate and this stuff was obviously vivid in his mind, but I also felt he was anxious to
- •In the cab on the way to the coffee shop, we passed Actium, on Columbus Avenue – the restaurant where I’d sat opposite Donatella Alvarez. I caught a glimpse of the
- •I studied the pages for a few moments, flicking through them randomly. Then I came across the ‘Todd’ calls. His surname was Ellis.
- •I left the office at around 4 p.M. And went to Tenth Street, where I’d arranged to meet my landlord. I handed over the keys and took away the remainder of my
- •I looked back at Ginny. She pulled out the chair and sat down. She placed her clutch bag on the table and joined her hands together, as though she were about to
- •I half smiled, and he was gone.
- •I glared at him.
- •I nodded, and stuck my hand out. ‘Thanks for coming.’
- •It was only the middle of the day, and yet because the sky was so overcast there was a weird, almost bilious quality to the light.
- •Versions of this encounter passed through my mind continually during the night, each one slightly different – not a cigar, but a cigarette or a candle, not a wine bottle,
- •I had nowhere to go, and very little to lose. I whispered back, ‘You’re not.’
- •I listened to the report, but was barely able to take it in. Someone at Actium that night – probably the bald art critic with the salt-and-pepper beard – had seen the
I had to do a short induction course in the morning. Then I spent most of the early afternoon chatting to some of the other traders and more or less observing the
room. The atmosphere at Lafayette was – as Kevin had said it might be in such a place – friendly and collaborative. There was a sense of us all being in this together, of
us all working against the big marketmakers down the street. But it didn’t take long to see that there were factions in the room, and some big personalities, and that the
dynamics weren’t always going to be so easy to read. There were different trading styles, as well, of course. The guy to my left, for example, was a manic keyboardcrusher
who didn’t seem to do any research or analysis.
‘What’s that stock?’ I asked him, pointing to a symbol on his screen soon after I’d sat down.
‘No idea,’ he mumbled, not taking his eyes off what he was doing, ‘it has a big spread and it’s moving, and that’s all I need to know.’
Other traders seemed more cautious and did quite a lot of research – by watching the TV sets bolted to the side-wall, or by running from their tables to a Bloomberg
terminal at the top of the room, or just by poring over endless stock graphs on their own screens. In any case, when I felt I had the measure of the room, and its mood, I
went to work at my allotted table-space, looking for some likely trades myself. But as it was my first day I took it fairly easy and when I closed out my positions before
the final bell I was only about $5,000 up. Given my admittedly short track record, this didn’t seem like all that much to me, but some of the other traders didn’t agree.
Clearly, as the new kid on the block, I had already aroused a certain amount of curiosity, not to say suspicion, in the room. Someone asked me rather tentatively if I
wanted to join a group of them who were going for a drink to some place down at Pier 17 Pavilion, but I declined. I didn’t want to form any new alliances just yet.
It had been a relatively slow day for me – at least in terms of mental activity and the amount of work I’d done – so when I got home I was feeling pretty restless,
even a little frenzied. Unable to sleep that night, I stayed on the couch in the living-room, watching TV and reading. Against a background of cable movies, quiz shows
and commercials, I ploughed through the financial sections of the day’s papers, a biography of Warren Buffet and all the text, captions, advertising copy, mastheads and
photo credits of half a dozen glossy business magazines.
*
On my second morning at Lafayette, a Tuesday, I spent a good deal of time nosing around the various financial websites. I eventually opened up more than a dozen
major positions, eighty thousand shares in total, and then concentrated on tracking them carefully.
At about eleven-thirty, there was a slight commotion to my left. A few tables up, three of the guys in baseball caps, who appeared to be working very closely
together, started punching the air and hissing yessss to each other. It took another few minutes for the ‘tip’ to filter down. The keyboard-cruncher beside me, whose
name was Jay, pulled himself away from his screen for a brief moment and turned to face me.
‘Think something’s just come through on the wire about some biotech stock.’
He shrugged his shoulders and then went back to work, but the guy beside him wheeled his chair around and spoke to me as though we’d known each other since
high school.
‘Medical breakthrough, hasn’t been announced yet. MEDX – that’s Mediflux Inc., a Florida drug company, yeah? – seems they’ve got some anti-cancer protein in
development. It’s got the white-coats over at the National Cancer Research Foundation all excited.’
‘And?’
He looked at me as if to say, What – are you a moron? Then, pausing uncertainly, he said, ‘Buy Mediflux!’
I could see that Jay, the guy beside me, was already doing just that. I nodded at the other guy and then went back to my screen to see what information might be
available about this pharmaceutical company – Mediflux Inc. It was currently selling at 43⅓, having moved up from an opening price of 37¾. Everyone was assuming it
was going to continue this upward trend, and everyone – at least everyone in the room around me – seemed to be buying Mediflux on that basis. I spent a while looking
at its fundamentals – historical earnings, growth potential, that kind of thing – and at one point during this Jay nudged me and said, ‘How much did you buy?’
I looked at him and paused, quickly reviewing in my head everything I’d just read about Mediflux.
‘I didn’t buy any,’ I said. ‘In fact, I’m going to sell it short.’
This meant that, contrary to the prevailing wisdom in the room, I expected the Mediflux share price to fall. While they were all busy buying it, I would borrow
Mediflux stock from my broker. I would then sell it, having committed to buying it back later at what I hoped would be a considerably lower price. The lower the price,
of course, the greater the profit for me.
‘You’re going to short it?’
He said this quite loudly, and as the word short darted its way around the tables like an acute pain along a sciatic nerve, you could almost feel the whole room
stiffen. There was a brief silence and then everyone started talking at the same time and checking their screens and looking across at my table. Over the next couple of
minutes the tension in the room increased as the original Mediflux faction regrouped and began hurling comments in my direction.
‘Feel sorry for you, buddy.’
‘Margin call!’
‘Loser!’
I ignored these taunts and got on with executing my short-sell strategy on Mediflux, as well as looking after my other positions. For the next while the Mediflux share
price continued to rise, reaching 51 points, but then it seemed to stabilize. Jay nudged me again and shrugged his shoulders as if to say, Talk to me, why did you short
it?
‘Because it’s all hype,’ I said. ‘What – a couple of mice with cancer in some laboratory somewhere sit up in bed and ask for tea and suddenly we’re all into a
buying frenzy?’ I shook my head. ‘And when is this new protein they’re developing going to have a commercial application anyway? Five years? Ten years?’
Jay looked worried all of a sudden and seemed to recoil into himself.
‘Besides,’ I said, pointing at my screen, ‘Eiben-Chemcorp pulled out of a takeover deal of Mediflux about six months ago, and it was never properly explained –
doesn’t anyone want to remember that?’
I could see him rapidly processing the information.
‘This does not have legs, Jay.’
He turned to the other guy beside him and started whispering. Soon – as my analysis made its way around to all of the other traders – dark clouds of uncertainty
descended on the room.
From the babble of muttering and clicking that ensued, it was obvious that two camps were emerging – some of the traders were going to hold on to their stock,
while others were going to join me in shorting Mediflux. Jay, and the guy beside him, reversed their positions. The baseball caps held fast to theirs, but refrained from
making any comments about it – not aloud, at any rate. I remained huddled over my terminal, keeping a low profile, even though the atmosphere was electric, with a
definite sense that in the ecosystem of the room I was an interloper who was making some kind of a bid for power. I hadn’t intended it that way, of course, but the thing
is, I was convinced that MEDX was a turkey – and so it was to prove.
Late in the afternoon, just as I had predicted, the stock collapsed. It started slipping at about 3.15 p.m., much to the consternation of about two thirds of the traders
in the room. MEDX closed at 17½ points, a drop of 36½ points from its high, earlier in the day, of 54.
At the closing bell, a cheer went up from a small group sitting at the table directly opposite me. They came over afterwards to introduce themselves – and I realized
that with them, Jay, the guy beside him, and one or two others, I had formed my own crew. It wasn’t only because they were happy to have taken the tip from me, but
it was also, I think, because of what they saw as the sheer, ballsy scale of my own trade. I had shorted 5,000 MEDX shares and come away with over $180,000. This
was more in one trade than most of them could hope to make in a year, and they loved it – loved the sanction it gave to risk, loved how it confirmed that scoring big
was possible.
One of the three baseball caps nodded at me from across the room, a gesture that I think was meant to indicate he was conceding defeat, but then he left quickly
with the other two and I didn’t get a chance to say to him – magnanimously, or, perhaps, patronizingly – that hey, they had come up with the stock in the first place. I
still refused to go for a drink with anyone, but I did stick around for ages, chatting and trying to find out as much as I could about how day-trading firms like this one
operated.
*
On my third morning at Lafayette I was the centre of attention. But I was also, undeniably, on trial. Was I a one-hit wonder – I’m sure they were all thinking – or did I
actually know what the fuck I was doing?
As it turned out my period of probation only lasted a few hours. A position with a data-storage company, JKLS – not unlike the one of the previous day – soon
presented itself, and I whispered to Jay that I was about to initiate coverage of the stock at its current price with an immediate short-sell. Jay, who had quietly assumed
the role of my underboss, passed on this information to the next table up, and within less than a minute it seemed that the whole room was shorting JKLS. During the
course of the morning, I fed out a few other tips that some people, but certainly not everyone, picked up on. Early in the afternoon, however, when the JKLS price
began falling rapidly, and a cheer went up, a quick review of my other tips took place, and the doubters joined in.
By the closing bell at four o’clock, it was my room.
Over the next couple of days, the trading ‘pit’ at Lafayette was packed to capacity – with all of the regulars in attendance, as well as quite a few new faces. I stuck
to my short-selling strategy and led an onslaught against a whole series of overhyped and overvalued stocks. My instinct for identifying these stocks appeared to be
unerring and it was thrilling to watch them all behave exactly as I had predicted. In turn, people were watching me very closely and naturally wanted to know how I was
doing it, but since these same people were also making a lot of money from my recommendations, no one had the temerity to come out straight and simply ask me.
Which was just as well, because I wouldn’t really have had an answer.