- •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 nodded.
‘Then you’ve got technical analysis. That’s where you study price-and-volume patterns and basically try to understand the psychology surrounding a stock.’
He continued looking at the screen as he spoke, and I continued nodding.
‘But trading is not an exact science, Eddie. I mean, the stock market can’t be pinned down to any one system, which is why you get fuzzy talk of “irrational
exuberance”, and people trying to explain market behaviour in terms of psychiatry, biology, and even brain chemistry. I’m not kidding you – there were actually
suggestions recently that investor caution was being inhibited by the high percentage of brokers and dealers on Prozac. So,’ he shrugged his shoulders, ‘given that no
one knows anything, it’s not surprising that most investors use a combination of the three basic approaches I’ve outlined to you.’
Over the next hour or so, still standing at the table – and looking like he’d just stepped in from a vigorous game of tennis – Bob Holland expanded on these ideas
and also went into the minutiae of options, futures, derivatives, as well as bonds, hedge funds, global markets and so on. I took a few notes, but when I heard the
explanations I realized that in a general way I did understand these terms, and that furthermore, just by thinking about this stuff, a large store of knowledge was being
unlocked in my brain, knowledge that I had probably accumulated unconsciously over the years.
When he’d done with the big picture – how the investment banks and fund managers operated – he started in on day-trading.
‘Then you’ve got guys like me,’ he said, ‘the new pariahs of Wall Street. Ten years ago it was the LBO types, the Gordon Gekkos. Now it’s the geeks in baseball
caps who sit in front of computers at home and trade thirty or forty times a day, picking off eighths, sixteenths, even thirty-seconds of a point per share, and then closing
out their positions before the end of trading.’ He looked away from the screen and directly at me, for maybe the second or third time since I’d arrived. ‘We’re accused
of distorting the markets and causing volatility in share prices, but that’s bullshit. It’s what they said in the Eighties about the takeover guys. We’re just the new wave,
Eddie – electronic day-trading is the spawn of technology and regulatory change. It’s that simple, it’s flux, it’s the nature of things.’ He shrugged his shoulders again and
turned back to the screen.
‘I mean, come here – look at this.’
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
percentages. He pointed to something on the screen – ATRX, a stock symbol for a biotech company – and said, ‘This one opened at around sixty dollars a share and
has just pulled back a little so its bid is now 59⅜ … and its offer …’ he pointed to another part of the screen, ‘is 59¾ – that’s a ⅜ spread. Now the thing is, thanks to
the latest software, and to regulatory changes introduced by the Securities & Exchange Commission, I can trade within that spread, and right here in my living-room.’
He highlighted the row of figures after the ATRX symbol and stared at it for a while. He checked something on one of the other screens, came back to the first one
and keyed something in. He waited for a couple of moments and keyed something else in. He waited again – one hand held up in mid-air – and then said, quietly, ‘Yes.’
He turned around to me and explained what he’d done. Using that new trading programme, he’d discovered that there were three marketmakers on ATRX’s bid
and two on the offer. Reckoning that ATRX would rebound, he took advantage of the wide spread by bidding 59 for 2,000 shares, which was over the best marketmaker
bid. Having topped this bid, Holland then got first in line to execute an order. The first 2,000 shares for sale at market went to him at 59. Very soon after this he
offered to sell for 59, which was still lower than the ask price posted by the big market-makers. Holland had guessed right, and the stock was taken off his hands almost
immediately. In just fifteen seconds and a few strokes of the keyboard he had netted over $500 and cut the spread by of a point.
I asked him how many trades like this he made every day.
Holland smiled for the first time. He said he made about thirty trades each day, mostly in lots of 1,000 or 2,000 shares, and rarely held a stock for more than ten
minutes.
He smiled again and said, ‘OK, they’re not all like that one, but a lot of them are.’ He paused. ‘It’s about identifying ripples in the charts and then reacting quickly.’
‘You mean, it’s not just about who has the most information?’
‘Shit no. With all the indicators that are available these days, you just end up with conflicting signals. Shit no.’
Now that I had his attention, I bombarded him with more questions. How much preparation did he do for each trading day? How many positions did he keep open
at any one time? What kind of commissions did he pay?
As Holland answered each of my questions, he gradually pulled himself away from the computer screens on the table. Then he started making himself an espresso,
but by the time it was ready and he was drinking it, he seemed to have become sufficiently detached from his work to notice again that he was wearing nothing but
boxer shorts, and to be self-conscious about it. He knocked back the remainder of the espresso, excused himself and wandered off down the hall into what I assumed
was a bedroom.
In his absence, I went over to look at the computer screens again. It was amazing … he had made $500 – the price of one hit of MDT – in just fifteen seconds! I
definitely wanted to learn how to do this, because if Bob Holland could execute thirty orders in a day, I was sure that I could manage a hundred, or more. When he
came back, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, I asked him how I should go about learning. He told me that the best way to get into day-trading was to just do it – trade, and
that most of the online brokers facilitated this by giving free access to simulated trading games and by conducting live tutorials.
‘Simulation games’, he said, in a tone that was becoming increasingly stilted, ‘are an excellent way of developing your skills, Eddie, and of gaining confidence in
placing trades but without actually having to take any risks.’
I got him to recommend some online brokers and software trading packages, and as I wrote this stuff down I kept firing questions at him. Holland answered
everything I asked him, and comprehensively, but I could see that he was becoming slightly alarmed, as if the rate and nature of my questions was perhaps more than
he’d bargained for – as if he felt that by answering them, by passing on this information, he might be unleashing some kind of Frankenstein monster into cyberspace,
some desperate, hungry individual capable of who-knew-what financial atrocities.
It had taken a while, but Holland was completely focused on me now. In fact, he appeared more concerned with each new question and started introducing a
cautionary note into his answers.
‘So look, start small, start by trading hundred-share lots for the first month or so, or at least until you find your feet …’
‘Hhm.’
‘… and don’t get too excited if you have a good day – one good day’s trading doesn’t mean you’re Warren Buffet. The next trade you make could just as easily
blow your account out …’
‘Hhm.’
‘… and when you enter a trade, make sure you have an idea of how you expect it to behave, because if it acts counter to that – get out!’
My impulse was to go Yeah, yeah, yeah to all of this, and Holland could see that. But the reason he wasn’t getting through to me was because the more he warned
me about the potential dangers of day-trading, the more excited I could feel myself becoming at the prospect of actually getting home and doing it.
As I was slipping my notebook into my jacket pocket, and then putting the jacket on to go, Holland upped the pace a little.
‘Trading can get pretty intense, you know.’ He paused, and then said all at a rush, ‘Don’t ever borrow money from family or friends, Eddie – I mean to trade, or to
get yourself out of a trading crisis.’ I looked at him, slightly alarmed myself now. ‘And don’t start lying to hide your losses either.’
There was a hint of desperation in his voice. I got the impression that he wasn’t so much talking to me as about himself. I also got the impression that he didn’t want
me to leave.