She wants him again. Didn’t expect to. She throws back the duvet, and when he reaches for it, pushes him down.
‘We have ten minutes,’ she says, then adds, ‘Invergarry and Merryman’s Bay — this isn’t really going to work, is it?’
Mike arrives at his desk early on Monday morning. He looks through the bar charts showing the Box’s new signals, and then opens the window where inflows and outflows are specified. He slowly punches out the zeroes of two hundred million dollars and hits enter to calculate the new target positions. The Box uses a ton of leverage, meaning he’ll have to do nearly a billion dollars of trades to regain his risk target. He opens all the trading platforms and arranges them across his screens. Markets are calm, and he’ll trickle the orders throughout the morning. The first trade sitting in the holding pen, waiting for him to authorize it, is to buy seventy-six million US dollars against Japanese yen. Here goes.
At two the next morning, Mike finds himself awake and can’t help checking his phone to see if anything is going on. He reads: ‘YEN DOWN 6% ON BOJ INTERVENTION STATEMENT’. What the. He’s short yen, right? He’s definitely short. The trend has been up, but Crispin’s eccentric bells and whistles are outweighing it. A gift from the gods.
But. These big shocks often reverse on a sixpence. Especially if they happen with Europe and America sleeping, on thin volumes. It could just be a flash-crash. His instincts scream that he should lock in the profits. He flips open his laptop to access his work computer remotely.
Crispin would tell him to let it be. Ad hoc interventions are a big no-no: let others be greedy and fearful, he’d say. But surely this is a special case. Mike opens the dashboard: the Box is up ten million dollars. He can’t update the signals from here, but they’d probably tell him to cut the position — the risk controls would see to that, wouldn’t they? Might as well do it now, secure the gains. It’s not supposed to be possible to trade remotely, but Mij once showed him a trick to get round the barrier, just in case he ever needed to make a one-off adjustment out of hours. His position is one hundred and sixty-seven million, so he could sell, say, a hundred — a little more than half. Make it one twenty. He opens the currency platform and punches it in: ‘SELL $120M JPY vs. USD’. Quote. Execute. Filled. He feels a surge of relief — he’s locked in the winnings — and goes to back to bed.
He has a dream in which he did the trade the wrong way round — sold yen instead of bought — but bluffers like him are used to such anxiety dreams and he rides it calmly. It’s okay, he reminds himself during moments of wakefulness. I’m up big, and I’m safe. It’s not until he’s sitting on the tube on the way to the office that realisation hits him in the stomach: he really did sell, not buy. He loaded the boat. He’s short about thirty billion yen. He’s probably blown his risk limits. Rogue trader. Fuck. Shitting fuck.
The crowded escalator, the pedestrian crossing, the lift — they all take an eternity. So. An ignominious end to ten wasted years. Sacked for unauthorised trading. Criminal investigation. Car-crash CV. Tabloid mockery. At last, with sinking heart but maintaining an appearance of calm, Mike walks to his desk and logs on. The screaming headline has changed — now it says, ‘YEN DOWN 10% ON BOJ INTERVENTION STATEMENT’. His eyes swivel across to the tracker. His accidental trade has sent the Box up another twelve million.
Breathe. Get it right this time. ‘BUY $200 MILLION JPY vs. USD’. Buy. Not sell. Actually, let’s make it a hundred and ninety-one point five. Looks more like a real MRI trade. The bid-ask is wide but who cares. Quote. Execute. Filled. Confirmed. Done.
As soon as the new trade feeds into his spreadsheet, the yo-yoing numbers settle down. He freezes the live data-feed for a moment, to savour their fat blackness. For reasons unknown, copper has moved in his favour too. Month-to-date profit: +$27,744,550. Year-to-date profit: +$33,030,898. Not bad for a night’s work.
‘Who’s got a yen position?’ snaps the big boss, the Generalissimo, as the trading floor begins to fill. Some traders look smug, some vaguely disappointed to have missed the action, a few pale and staring at their screens. ‘Rocket?’
‘The MRI was short,’ says Mike, brightly but without betraying any of the post-traumatic elation he feels. ‘It’s decently up.’
‘Good. Now you’re going to tell me it wants to double up. Underreaction effect, right? You seriously think this market’s underreacted? Underreacted, my arse.’
‘No — it’s cutting the position. I’ve already worked over a hundred bucks at seventy-eight fifty. It’s the risk model kicking in.’
The Generalissimo, whose largest positions are measured not in millions of dollars but billions, looks momentarily impressed. ‘For once your Crispin-o-matic contraption is actually thinking like a trader.’ Then the spotlight of his attention swings off elsewhere.
Mike slowly, stealthily opens the MRI’s virtual bonnet, tweaks a few well-buried risk parameters and hits a re-calc. Fancy that: the black-box supercomputer wants to trim positions across the board. Very sensible, this system of his. His contract entitles him to a twelve per cent cut of profits, which, as even he can calculate, currently amounts to more than two million pounds for the year.
A ray of autumn sunshine, having entered the atrium’s pinball machine of architectural glass somewhere high above, lays its hand miraculously on his arm. He’s the Rocket Jesus: the chosen one.
10. Explicit response
‘Strong diseases require strong remedies.’
By eleven, the Japanese dust has begun to settle and Mike takes a break, dodging the cabs to cross Park Lane. His daily constitutional is mocked by market-obsessed colleagues, but contributes to the semblance of self-assurance, of trusting the Box, on which his act depends. He shields his phone from the low sun and checks for personal emails. There is one.
Dear Mike,
At least I have hope. What hope do you have? You’ll always be a parasite. A gambler who doesn’t even have the guts to gamble with his own money. You invent nothing, you produce nothing, you inspire nothing, you facilitate sweet nothing. Your industry is specifically designed to contribute nothing positive to the world. You already know this.
Mike frowns, then smiles blandly. He wouldn’t expect a waster like James to understand concepts like price discovery, liquidity provision and market efficiency. Should he try to explain? Could he? Something about peaceful civilisations being built on systems of fair exchange? The challenge does not appeal. He pockets his phone and walks on.
Dan Mock is getting cold hands on his morning ride. His heavy gloves have seen him comfortably through the last few winters, but maybe the insulation has become compressed, or air is leaking through the stitching. Or maybe the vibration is doing something to his circulation. Working the throttle and brake has become hard work, and when he gets to work his hands feel weak for the next hour or two. One morning, he tries to help his technician disassemble a shielding rig but the nuts won’t budge. ‘Which gorilla tightened these?’ he asks, straining on the spanner. ‘You did,’ is the amused reply. Dan sighs and returns to the beam-modeller on his computer. He’s not employed for his spanner skills, after all.
The next morning, on the bike, he becomes aware that not only his hands but his toes are playing up. Definitely a circulation problem. The cold, posture and vibration might all be playing a part. He decides to make a few changes, as an experiment: extra liner gloves and socks; no coffee or alcohol and keep hydrated; stretch before and after each ride and at a halfway rest. If this basket of changes does the trick, he’ll withdraw them one by one to identify the true remedy.