Limitless

Late in the afternoon, just as I had predicted, the stock collapsed. It started slipping at about 3.15 p.m., much to the consternation of about two thirds of the traders in the room. MEDX closed at 17½ points, a drop of 36½ points from its high, earlier in the day, of 54.

At the closing bell, a cheer went up from a small group sitting at the table directly opposite me. They came over afterwards to introduce themselves – and I realized that with them, Jay, the guy beside him, and one or two others, I had formed my own crew. It wasn’t only because they were happy to have taken the tip from me, but it was also, I think, because of what they saw as the sheer, ballsy scale of my own trade. I had shorted 5,000 MEDX shares and come away with over $180,000. This was more in one trade than most of them could hope to make in a year, and they loved it – loved the sanction it gave to risk, loved how it confirmed that scoring big was possible.

One of the three baseball caps nodded at me from across the room, a gesture that I think was meant to indicate he was conceding defeat, but then he left quickly with the other two and I didn’t get a chance to say to him – magnanimously, or, perhaps, patronizingly – that hey, they had come up with the stock in the first place. I still refused to go for a drink with anyone, but I did stick around for ages, chatting and trying to find out as much as I could about how day-trading firms like this one operated.

On my third morning at Lafayette I was the centre of attention. But I was also, undeniably, on trial. Was I a one-hit wonder – I’m sure they were all thinking – or did I actually know what the fuck I was doing?

As it turned out my period of probation only lasted a few hours. A position with a data-storage company, JKLS – not unlike the one of the previous day – soon presented itself, and I whispered to Jay that I was about to initiate coverage of the stock at its current price with an immediate short-sell. Jay, who had quietly assumed the role of my underboss, passed on this information to the next table up, and within less than a minute it seemed that the whole room was shorting JKLS. During the course of the morning, I fed out a few other tips that some people, but certainly not everyone, picked up on. Early in the afternoon, however, when the JKLS price began falling rapidly, and a cheer went up, a quick review of my other tips took place, and the doubters joined in.

By the closing bell at four o’clock, it was my room.

Over the next couple of days, the trading ‘pit’ at Lafayette was packed to capacity – with all of the regulars in attendance, as well as quite a few new faces. I stuck to my short-selling strategy and led an onslaught against a whole series of overhyped and overvalued stocks. My instinct for identifying these stocks appeared to be unerring and it was thrilling to watch them all behave exactly as I had predicted. In turn, people were watching me very closely and naturally wanted to know how I was doing it, but since these same people were also making a lot of money from my recommendations, no one had the temerity to come out straight and simply ask me. Which was just as well, because I wouldn’t really have had an answer.

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 prizewinning 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?