Alan Glynn - The Dark Fields aka Limitless

But when he elaborated on this a bit, explaining that he was one of seven or eight managing directors in the company who babysat their own deals and then came out with huge commissions, I realized for the first time that Kevin wasn’t just some Wall Street schmoe. From what he was telling me, I quickly reckoned that he probably cleared about two or three million a year.

Now I was impressed.

‘What about Van Loon? Is he…’ I asked, not even having a real question here, obviously succumbing a little to the magnetic pull of celebrity that still surrounded Kevin’s boss.

‘Carl’s all right. He’s mellowed a lot, you know. Over the years. But he still works as hard as ever.’

I nodded, thinking How hard could that be?

‘The firm wouldn’t be what it is today without him.’

This was a man who probably cleared about two or three million a week .

‘Hhn.’

‘So… how have you been?’

‘Me? Fine.’

I didn’t remember much of our previous encounter, but I was pretty sure I’d mentioned my book, and probably without saying that it was part of a cheesy series for a second-rate publisher – so, at least as far as I knew, Kevin thought I was a writer of some kind, a commentator, someone with their finger, so to speak, on the pulse of the Zeitgeist … someone he could have an intelligent, self-congratulatory but non-threatening conversation with, and about stuff like the new economy and megatrends and digitalization.

But I got to the point fairly fast.

‘What do you make of all this electronic day-trading, Kevin?’

He thought for a second. ‘It’s just noise. These guys aren’t speculators, or even investors, they’re gamblers – or else sorry geeks who think they’ve democtratized the markets.’ He made a face. ‘When this bubble pops, let me tell you, there’s going to be a lot of blood spattered on the walls.’

He took a sip from his drink.

I lifted my glass. ‘I’ve been doing it at home on my PC, using a software trading package I bought on Forty-seventh Street. I’m up about a quarter of a million in two days.’

Kevin looked at me in horror for a few seconds, taking in the information. But he was also confused, and obviously didn’t know what to say. Then it registered.

‘ A quarter of a million?’

‘Hmm.’

‘ In two days? That’s pretty good.’

‘Yeah, I think so. But I find I’m weirdly – how can I put this? – dissatisfied with it. I feel constricted. I need to expand.’

As he tried to come to terms with what I was telling him, Kevin shifted on his stool and maybe even squirmed a little. He was a confident guy, clearly very successful, and it was odd to see him mired in uncertainty like this.

‘Ehm… perhaps…’ he scratched his nose, ‘you could… why don’t you try one of those day-trading firms?’

I asked him what difference that would make.

‘Well, you’re not isolated, you’re in a room with a bunch of other traders and on the principle that no one in an environment like that wants to see anyone else failing , you help each other out, and share information. Most firms also offer high leverage, anywhere between five to ten times your deposit. You get a better feel for the behaviour of the markets, as well,’ – he was getting back into his stride here – ‘because it’s often just a question of being able to gauge the collective mood, and then deciding either to go with it or… I don’t know’ – he shrugged his shoulders – ‘ against it.’

I asked him if he could recommend one of these places.

‘There are a couple of good ones I’ve heard about – actually on, or at least around, Wall Street itself. Though if you ask me, Eddie, it sounds like you’re doing pretty good on your own.’

I wrote down the names he reeled off and thanked him anyway. Then we each took sips from our respective glasses.

‘So… a quarter of a million in two days.’ He whistled in admiration. ‘What’s your strategy?’

I was about to give him an edited version of events when two guys in suits came up behind us and one of them slapped Kevin on the back. ‘Hey Doyle, you old dog, what’s happening?’

These were money-scented financial-sector jocks, and when Kevin introduced me but didn’t say that I was a managing director or an executive vice-president with this or that outfit, they more or less ignored me. During the ensuing conversation about the emerging markets of Latin America, and then about the tech stocks bubble, I could see Kevin struggling with his fear that I was going to start talking again about day-trading on a PC – and in front of these guys. So when I stood up to go, I think he was a little relieved.

I told him I’d phone him in a few days’ time and let him know how I’d gotten on with that thing we’d been discussing.

Lafayette Trading was on Broad Street, just a few blocks down from the New York Stock Exchange. In the main room of a sparsely furnished suite of offices on the fourth floor, twenty tables were arranged in a large rectangle. Each table held enough terminals and PCs for at least three traders, and of the fifty or so traders I saw there on my first morning – all male, each seated in comfortable executive-style chairs – I’d say more than half of them were under thirty years old, and of those about half again were wearing jeans and baseball caps.

The deal was that you put down a minimum deposit of $25,000 and Lafayette then provided all the hardware and software you needed in order to trade. In return for this, they charged a commission of two cents a share on each trade you made. If you wanted it, and most people did, they also offered pretty high leverage on your deposit. I registered with them, paying a deposit of $200,000 and then arranged to leverage myself to two and a half times that amount – which meant, effectively, that I was starting off this new phase of my trading career with half a million dollars at my disposal.

I had to do a short induction course in the morning. Then I spent most of the early afternoon chatting to some of the other traders and more or less observing the room. The atmosphere at Lafayette was – as Kevin had said it might be in such a place – friendly and collaborative. There was a sense of us all being in this together, of us all working against the big marketmakers down the street. But it didn’t take long to see that there were factions in the room, and some big personalities, and that the dynamics weren’t always going to be so easy to read. There were different trading styles, as well, of course. The guy to my left, for example, was a manic keyboard-crusher who didn’t seem to do any research or analysis.

‘What’s that stock?’ I asked him, pointing to a symbol on his screen soon after I’d sat down.

‘No idea,’ he mumbled, not taking his eyes off what he was doing, ‘it has a big spread and it’s moving, and that’s all I need to know.’

Other traders seemed more cautious and did quite a lot of research – by watching the TV sets bolted to the side-wall, or by running from their tables to a Bloomberg terminal at the top of the room, or just by poring over endless stock graphs on their own screens. In any case, when I felt I had the measure of the room, and its mood, I went to work at my allotted table-space, looking for some likely trades myself. But as it was my first day I took it fairly easy and when I closed out my positions before the final bell I was only about $5,000 up. Given my admittedly short track record, this didn’t seem like all that much to me, but some of the other traders didn’t agree. Clearly, as the new kid on the block, I had already aroused a certain amount of curiosity, not to say suspicion, in the room. Someone asked me rather tentatively if I wanted to join a group of them who were going for a drink to some place down at Pier 17 Pavilion, but I declined. I didn’t want to form any new alliances just yet.