Limitless

I turned to face the huge window behind where I was standing and saw myself reflected in its bronze-tinted glass, people and cars outside on Forty-eighth Street passing right through me as though I were a ghost. In addition to everything else, I now found myself in the inappropriate position of being disappointed that Van Loon’s daughter apparently refused to see me as anything other than a genial associate of her father’s – and a pedantic, panic-stricken, overweight one at that. I left the building, made my way over to Fifth Avenue and started walking downtown. Despite these grim thoughts, I somehow managed to keep things under control. Then, as I was crossing Forty-second Street, something else occurred to me, and I shoved my hand out, on impulse, to hail a cab.

Twenty minutes later I was taking another elevator, this time up to the fourth floor of Lafayette Trading on Broad Street. This had been the scene of earlier triumphs – days of excitement and success – and I figured now there was no longer anything to stop me from trying to re-create that. I didn’t have the advantage of being full-thrust on MDT, OK, but neither did I care any more. My confidence had taken a bruising, and I just wanted to see how well I could do on my own.

There was a mixed reaction when I walked into the room. Some people, including Jay Zollo, went out of their way to ignore me. Others couldn’t help smiling and doffing their baseball caps in my direction. Even though I hadn’t been there for a while and didn’t have any positions open, my account was still active. I was told my ‘usual’ spot was taken, but that others were available and I could start trading immediately if I wanted to.

As I took my place at one of the terminals and got ready, I could feel a curiosity growing in the room about what I intended to do. There was a definite buzz now, with some people looking over my shoulder, and others keeping a close eye on things from the opposite side of the ‘pit’. It was a lot of pressure to be under and when I found that I wasn’t quite sure how to proceed, I had to admit to myself that perhaps I’d been a little hasty in coming here. But it was too late to pull out.

I spent a while studying the screen, and gradually it all came back to me. It wasn’t such a complicated process – but what was complicated, of course, was choosing the right stocks. I hadn’t been following the markets of late and didn’t really know where to look. My previous strategy of short-selling, which had been heavily dependent on research, wasn’t much use to me either, so I decided to play it safe on my first day back – I decided to go with the prevailing wisdom and buy tech stocks. I bought shares in Lir Systems, a risk-management services company, in KeyGate Technologies, an Internet security outfit, and in various dot-coms, Boojum, Wotlarks!,@Ease, Dromio, PorkBarrel.com, eTranz, WorkNet.

Once I started I couldn’t stop, and thanks to a combination of recklessness and fear, I ended up emptying my bank account, spending everything I had in the space of a couple of hours. Matters weren’t helped by the artificial, game-like nature of electronic trading, nor by the dangerous sense I increasingly had that the money involved wasn’t real. Naturally, this storm of activity attracted a lot of attention in the room, and even though my ‘strategy’ was about as unoriginal and mainstream as you could get, the rate and scale of my trading obviously gave it a curious shape – a colour, a character – of its own. Before long, as a result, people started following my lead, watching my every move, channelling ‘tips’ and ‘information’ out from my workstation. There was an urgency about the whole thing – no one wanted to get left behind – and I soon had the impression that lots of the traders around me were borrowing heavily or renegotiating leverage on their deposits.

The dizzying Net stocks boom still had the power, apparently, to disorient and whipsaw anyone who dared to get near it – and this included me, because although I’d landed here today on the back of my reputation, of my previous performance, I was now beginning to realize that this time around not only did I not know what I was doing, I didn’t know how to stop …