Dear Money (34 page)

Play young; that is, stay focused, hungry. Only objects that would make me race belonged on my desk: hot chili sauce from Belize, for example—brought back by Kathy Park from her vacation there—to remind me that the rush was what it was all about; a jaguar figurine; a picture of the Rolling Stones from the
Sticky Fingers
days; a racecar; a pair of stilettos. Snake had his mother's curry powder in a little glass jar; Maxi had a framed pencil sketch of his favorite racehorse (before Maxi was sent back to the paddock and I assumed his seat); Tiger had a picture of his girlfriend in a bikini, staring right at him with a pleading little twinkle. Josh had his movie stars, the lassoed Clint and Winona the thief, because he liked the exhilaration of escape and the beauty of second chances. Sam had a miniature silver lacrosse stick, given to him by his dad before he'd dropped dead of a heart attack; he'd been second in command to the New York police commissioner in the 1970s. Sam also had his father's badge, which he flashed when a cop pulled him over for speeding. Gus, the Korean, had figures and equations, written in his neat hand, taped to the edges of his monitors: prepayment models, simulation-based pricing of MBS, OAS adjustment, convexity of MSR portfolios—sexy. Gus was the analyst, earnestly doing his job. Of the lot, he spent the longest hours at the desk on weekends. On my desk I also had a few Monopoly houses and hotels.

Win asked what I really wanted and how badly I wanted it. "There's no other way to put this, so I'll give it to you straight. What's going to make you hard?" he asked. "Or its equivalent."

"Wet?" I smiled, giving it right back to him. ("That's what he likes about you," Snake had said, "that you'll tell him to fuck off right to his face.")

"No.
Hard.
And fast. Welcome to the man's world."

It was like some weird tantric position involving money and risk and exhilaration and the ever-present moment of the bet. For what was a trading floor if not an organized (and legitimate) institutionalized casino, a context for transforming amorphous desire into the fungible, into substance, into certificates, into coupons, into commodities, into cold
hard
profit?
TODAY COULD BE THE DAY.
That's what all the trains in Penn Station say. And I was not immune. I wanted a mansion like Isabella Power's. I wanted to complain about my mirror not fitting through the door—or at least be able to if I chose to. I wanted to be a part of the conversation that had embraced New York, America: "If you own something," our President once said, "you have a vital stake in the future of our country." Weren't we all, or at least 70 percent of us, caught up in this myth? So I felt the change from the optative to the indicative. I also wanted to show—prove—that I was capable of working hard, long hours at an office like all those other people and pull in the means to afford whatever it was I wanted.

It was no longer a matter of if, just when. And this was the force of Win's question. One needed a mantra or talisman of some sort. The when, the mystery of When. The arrival of the drive and the force and the motivation and the perpetuation. The momentum.
The Mo.
It's what made the trading floor go—getting it right. Profits and losses recorded in black and white, and successes measured objectively.

By mid-fall 2004, as Win's protégée, I shined—even if I was still untested. I flushed with the desire. I wanted to be here. I had learned how to get hard. And this, this surprising inflection, in all seriousness, was why I began to dream that I'd be making the big trades, that Paramount (a client) would be calling on me, asking me to
do the deal.
This was why I got out of bed every day at 5
A.M.
This was why I had no regrets telling the university that I wasn't coming back. "I'm sorry, but I'm hard," I wanted to tell the dean, the bespectacled 4
P.M.
cochair of the breakout session of the Interim Committee on Curriculum Development. I was J. P. Morgan. I was Davy Crockett.
I'm sorry, I'm going to make the sun rise.
I would find the secret lever that made the world turn. I would, as they say, amass wealth. And that accumulation would generate its own gravitational pull, the way winning breeds more winning, bringing with it more money. I could smell it. It smelled of rain-washed streets and gun metal and sounded like the tumblers of a safe clicking into place for me.

What I didn't know yet was that the drive has to be tempered. Yes, it was good to be hard, but you shouldn't get crazy hard. You had to
see,
to perceive. It's a system of checks and balances, like the writer who has to constantly balance ego with self-doubt to write well. Self-doubt, however, is not a term used on the floor. On the floor we called it "mastery of emotion," and we understood, by what was not said, what we meant by that phrase. The hardest challenge is the split-second judgment you have to make, the decision that comes from some subliminal input you don't recognize. That's what makes the difference. The more centered you are, the more capable you will be of making those decisions.

You can't be trained to do that. You just have to be exposed. You develop an abstract sense of how the market reacts, an art that cannot be specified in detail, cannot be transmitted by prescription, since none exists. It can be passed on only by example, from master to apprentice. Since Win wasn't actively trading, my master was Snake. He was poised, elegant, with his sleeves always buttoned, never breaking a sweat, quiet. Sometimes in the middle of a big trade he looked so at peace you'd think he'd just finished a yoga class, had an extra-long shavasina, index finger and thumb pressed together—"dialed in," we called it, to the gods of Pythagoras and the gods of Las Vegas. It didn't matter that chaos swirled around him, that Tiger (second in command of our seat), who was riddled with impatience, kept his nervous leg pounding into the dull carpet like an outboard motor, propelling his vessel. (No wonder he didn't drink. Drink would have ignited his already boundless energy and sent him off the reservation.)

Not all traders were like Snake, in fact very few. But the really good ones were. The higher the stakes, the calmer they seemed to become, as if listening to music playing from the bottom of a well. The stories of the trader who throws chairs, screams at people to fuck off, who slams phones and kicks in walls—sure, they existed too, in larger numbers. Indeed, they weren't relegated to the past, those stereotypical 1980s traders. But Snake was one of the really good ones. The calm was his edge, his advantage, his secret, his trademark. Generally star traders don't reveal their secrets, but even if they did, it would mean little because it's a gift. Watching and listening as the trader connects disparate facts is the only possible way to learn, like the writer who studies the books she reads to understand how they are made so she can steal various tricks for her own work, applied with her own innate talent. At a certain point, therefore, the novice has to be thrown into the fray and start trading for herself to learn what her style and secrets are.

Which brings us back to used cars: Toyotas and Hondas and Fords. No Mercedes-Benzes, no BMWs, no Bentleys—those belonged to securitized traders, the higher-value realm of the mortgage universe, the terrain of mansions and penthouses and their requisite jumbo mortgages. Toyotas—I was consumed by them. I cared about pricing Toyotas, and I was good at it. I trusted my gut, and for a streak I was correct. So I'd have a lot of Toyotas to unload. I'd know the client who wanted to sell them and the fund that wanted to buy them. I'd be asked to price the trade (say, offer 100mm FN 5s June [Toyotas]). I'd put my level on it (97–04). There'd be the dance with the client, the sweet tones and chirping, trying to get me to lower my level, wheeling me with flirtatious banter and male bravado, trying to convince me the better price was 97–02.

For example, Robert Shane, with a potbelly so big he could balance pens on it (which he did). Three kids. A wife. I'd seen him throw back one too many, many times. He was a simple guy, liked Jack Daniel's. And through his loose tongue I came to know that the petite wife with tight curls and a skinny, chiseled face found meaning in her life by running the Parents' Association at the kids' school. He had two daughters with severe crushes on Ashton Kutcher (Shane wanted me to speak to his girls, come over for a family dinner, tell them what it was like to be a woman on the Street); his boy was a toddler, already wielding toy guns and sabers, a talent that the dad perceived as a sign of his son's intelligence, how far he'd go. I sat there over cocktails and stoked the stories, asking for more details, laughing when he did, envisioning his boy, trying to make Shane feel singular, unique. My interest was genuine. I liked these people. They were good people, all out for the same end—good, hard-working souls who'd been taught the most direct route to American happiness, and here we were in a bar, stoking it with commentary on and admiration for little Bobby Shane Junior's deftness with a light-saber. I was soft and kind, so in the beginning people thought I'd be easy to push around, but it was simply my armor.

"Sold to you," I say now on the phone, which actually means "I don't buy that price." "Firm?" Shane asks in a husky tone. He's on the wire, on speaker. Everyone around me who wants (and needs) to can hear that husky tone. They all know it's Shane. Of course Snake's listening, because the ante on this trade isn't small. "I'm axed to sell," I say. "You hit the bid," he responds.

Immediately the bid on the follow is 97–03. My gut feel is spot-on. "Jesus Christ," Snake says, smiling. "Okay, let's try another. That was luck," he says. Maybe. But not if it becomes a streak. Not if you're consistent.

And soon I was. And soon, like statistics in baseball, it was all there for everyone to see, plain as day. I was good. The word got out. I could do this. In the beginning there were high-fives, thumbs-up, and I was grateful to these fierce, uncomplicated boys on the trading floor, to be counted among their number. "Keep hitting those singles," Snake would say, leaning back in his chair to catch a full view of me three seats down. All the others could hear. I liked that they could hear. And those not on our desk took roundabout routes to the bathroom to pass behind us, just to hear how it was going, how I was doing, catch a telltale phrase. People knew I was Win's, but they didn't know I was also Radalpieno's. At best they could guess how high up the bet went.

Getting it right, making money from your own good judgment, is a sensational emotion. Yes, there's a mix of fear in there, like oil in sandstone—the fear needs to be there, is essential. I became part of the team, but I was simply there, too busy, swept up in
the Mo.
And in this way I rose, my trades going from singles to the occasional extra base. I was high. Everyone knows the rush of winning, the giddiness, the urge, the need for more. I wanted more, and there was more to be got, plenty, like picking apples from trees in the fall—easier even. Money was cheap. I worked ten-, twelve-, fourteen-hour days, but only as an afterthought did I ever notice it—say, in the limo home that Win had ordered for me. He was proud, which made me want to work harder. The big game no longer fazed me. Tens of millions took their proper shape—or maybe I was finding mine—and it was with these faces, laughing after hours, their ties askew in midtown bars, the people behind the trades, that I belonged, and out of this I stepped completely from myself to become something I barely recognized, and yet thrilled to behold.

Then it happened. The first time. I can remember what I was wearing that day, a blue silk blouse, a lighter shade than the pantsuit I had on. In the mirror that morning I'd thought the shirt had looked pretty; it had brought out the blue of my eyes. I can remember the date, October 15, one year almost to the day since the publication of
Generation of Fire.
The paperback was in the stores, notices were in the papers, but on the way to work none of that crossed my mind. I was thinking about the shirt, how much I liked it. Later, I'd save it as a reminder, but I'd never wear it again. The pit taught you about luck, about talismans: you never wrote with a red pen; you found a penny, you picked it up; no hats on the bed; no riding in the elevator you rode in on the day you were slammed; no ordering from the restaurant you used that fateful day. Snake wouldn't have let me wear the shirt again had I tried. "That shirt's not coming in here," he said when the deal was finished. It was the shirt's fault in the end, but in the beginning it was my fault we got rinsed, and no one was laughing.

My mistake was simple: I'd bought Toyotas today at yesterday's valuation. I'd bought quite a few, compounding my loss. Let's put it this way: yesterday, 1,000 houses were selling for 95. Overnight, some pretty big things happened in Japan, and the ripple of the wave worked its way around the world, affecting
LIBOR
and the rates at which a homeowner, and even I, could borrow money. In my speed to cover risk from late the day before, I didn't watch the other markets, ignored data.

I wanted the bonds. We were short the basis, and FN 5s were nearly impossible to find. I stood to gain a bundle, my biggest win to date. But because of the overnight changes, the equivalent of yesterday's 95 valuation of 1,000 houses was now 94–18. The fast calculations I did were based on yesterday's curve, spread and carry calculations, causing me to lose more than a million dollars. It's the overconfident beginning skier who smashes into a tree. Let's put it another way: ice cream is selling all over the city for $1 a cone, $10 a gallon for the fancy stuff. Overnight, the cost of cream shoots up because there's a milk shortage, a problem with cows in the heartland. You forget to check the one crucial piece of information that's going to let you know if the pricing is steady, and you think you're getting quite a deal when you sell all those gallons for $11, but the person buying is the winner, because everywhere else those gallons are selling for $14. If you failed to check on the cows—news that would be right before your eyes if you were in the business of peddling ice cream—you'd be out a crucial piece of information. If it was sunny yesterday, there is, of course, no guarantee that it will be sunny today, even if you wake up to a clear blue sky. You must check the weather report and also the feel of the air, the way it hits your intuition.