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

more rapidly and comprehensively than anyone at Lafayette would ever realize.

But that also wasn’t enough to explain it – because there were plenty of well-resourced, well-financed research departments around, from the windowless

backrooms of investment banks and brokerage houses throughout the country, stuffed full of pale, nameless ‘quants’ number-crunching till dawn, to places stuffed full of

Nobel-prize winning mathematicians and economists, places like the Santa Fe Institute and MIT. For an individual, I was processing a huge amount of information – it

was true – but I still couldn’t compete with outfits like those.

So what was it?

After the first day of my second week at Lafayette, I tried to evaluate the various possibilities – maybe it was superior information, or heightened instinct, or brain

chemistry, or some kind of mysterious synergy between the organic and the technological – but as I sat there at my table, staring vacantly at the screen, these

ruminations slowly coalesced into an overwhelming vision of the vastness and beauty of the stock market itself. Grappling for understanding, I soon realized that despite

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

something more than just a market for stocks. In its complexity and ceaseless motion the twenty-four-hour global network of trading systems was nothing less than a

template for human consciousness, with the electronic marketplace perhaps forming humanity’s first tentative version of a collective nervous system, a global brain.

Moreover, whatever interactive combination of wires and microchips and circuits and cells and receptors and synapses was required to achieve this grand convergence

of band-width and brain-tissue, it seemed to me in that moment that I had tumbled upon it – I was jacked in and booted up … my mind was a living fractal, a mirrored

part of the greater functioning whole.

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

written out, say, on the night sky, as Nathaniel Hawthorne would have it), the revelation can only be the result of a morbid and disordered state of mind, but surely this

was somehow different, surely this was empirical, demonstrable – after all, at the end of my sixth day of trading at Lafayette, I had an unbroken chain of winners and

over a million dollars in my brokerage account.

*

That evening I went for a drink with Jay and a few of the others to a place on Fulton Street. After my third beer and half a dozen cigarettes, not to mention a torrent of

day-trading lore from my new colleagues, I resolved to set a few things in train – changes that I felt it was now time to make. I resolved to put a deposit down on an

apartment – somewhere bigger than my place on Tenth Street, and in a different part of town, maybe Gramercy Park, or even Brooklyn Heights. I also resolved to

throw out all my old clothes and furniture and accumulated stuff, and only replace what I absolutely needed. Most important, however, I resolved to move on from

day-trading and into a wider playing field, to move up to money management maybe, or hedge funds or global markets.