Limitless

During the course of the late morning and early afternoon, all but one of the seven stocks I’d chosen went up in price, and by widely varying degrees. I made quick decisions about which ones to offload. Digicon, for instance, went to 17, but I didn’t think it was going to go any higher, so I sold it and cleared a profit of more than $600 – less the commission and transaction fee, of course. Another stock rose from 18½ points to 24¾, and another from 31 to By offloading each of these stocks at the right time, I managed to increase my basic fund from about $7,000 to nearly $12,000, and in the last two hours of trading I sold off everything except US-Cova. This was the one stock that hadn’t moved all day, despite signals that an uptrend was imminent. I felt irritated by this, because when I’d been choosing these stocks something almost physical had happened to me … a vague, tingling sensation in the pit of my stomach – or so it had seemed at the time. In any case, all of the other stocks had shifted, and I didn’t understand why this one wasn’t complying.

Undeterred, I placed an order for an extra 650 shares in US-Cova, at $22 per share. About twenty minutes later there was a blip on the screen and US-Cova started moving. It went up by two points, then by another three points. I watched as the share price just kept climbing upwards. When it reached $36 I typed in a sell order, but still held out for another increase, and only sent in the order when the share price had hit $39, an increase of $17 in little over an hour.

At close of trading on that first day, therefore, I had more than $20,000 in my account. Take away the initial $7,000 and fees, and that meant I had made somewhere in the region of $12,000 profit in a single day. It was small potatoes on the stock market, obviously, but it was still more than I’d often made in half a year as a freelance copywriter. This was of course amazing, but it also hit me what an incredible run of luck I’d had: seven picks and seven winners, and on an average day of trading where the market had closed only twelve points up. It was extraordinary. So how had I done it? Had it been luck? I tried to go back over the whole thing, to retrace my steps and see if I could identify what signals I’d picked up on, what prompts had led me to these relatively obscure, low-profile stocks in the first place, but it proved an impossibly labyrinthine task. I checked through dozens of trend-lines again, re-ran analysis programmes and at one point found myself crawling across the floor of the apartment over the open pages of broadsheet newspapers and glossy magazines, in search of some article I vaguely remembered reading and that may have suggested something – or sparked off an idea, or led in some other direction, or not. I simply didn’t know. Perhaps I’d heard something on TV, an off-the-cuff remark made by any one of a hundred investment analysts. Or come across something in a chat-room, or on a message-board, or in a webzine.

Trying to reconfigure my mental co-ordinates at the exact moments I’d chosen those stocks was like trying to stuff toothpaste back into a tube, and I soon gave up. But the one conclusion I could draw from this was that I’d probably used fundamental and quantitative analysis in about equal measure, and even though I might not get the proportions exactly the same on the next occasion, and could never recreate the conditions of that particular day, I was certainly on the right track. Unless, of course – intolerable thought – it had all been some kind of a fluke, an epic stroke of beginner’s luck. I didn’t believe that it had been, really, but I still needed to know for sure and was therefore anxious to get trading again the next day. Which meant keeping up the preparatory in-take of data, and – naturally – of MDT-48.

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 where, and indeed who, I was. Before the alarm jolted me awake, I’d been in the middle of a particularly vivid dream set in Melissa’s old apartment on Union Street in Brooklyn. Nothing much happened in the dream, really, but it had a guided, virtual-reality feel to it, with tracking shots and detailed close-ups, and even sounds … the evocative whine of the radiators, for example, doors slamming down the hall, kids’ voices rising up from the street below.