Thomas Hoover - The samurai strategy

We were about to start moving billions and billions of dollars, fast. And since we didn't know how long we could continue before Matsuo Noda figured out a way to stop us, we were going to adhere to a schedule that covered the most vital sectors first-those outfits whose R amp;D Tam considered strategic to America's future technological leadership. Our goal for the first day was five billion, worldwide.

Thus the countdown began. Henderson's financial artist loaded Tam's new program tape onto DNI's big NEC supercomputer and cranked up. We had roughly sixty hours till the opening bell on Monday.

"It's the worst of times, buddy, and the best of times. Whatever dude once said that didn't know the half of it. He oughta be around now to check out the Street."

That was Henderson's Georgia Mafia co-conspirator, an irritatingly smug young man with red hair and acne who dressed entirely in white, right down to his skinny Italian tie. We were told he went by the handle of Jim Bob. As he meditated upon Wall Street's macroeconomic incongruities, he punched a Willie Nelson tape into his boom box and popped a Coors, pregame warm-up for programming a full-scale assault on the U.S. securities markets.

Jim Bob allowed as how he'd arrived in the Big Apple four years earlier with a cardboard suitcase, a finance degree from Georgia Tech, and a larger than regulation endowment of natural cunning. After a couple of years' toil in Henderson's quasi-legal vineyards, he'd gone out on his own, whereupon he'd parlayed his winnings with Bill and the remnants of a baseball scholarship into what was now a high six-figure "haircut," the name options players use for their grubstake. The way he figured it, he was just hitting his stride.

How, I inquired at one point during that long weekend, had he managed it?

"Chum, it's idiot simple. You buy into fear, sell into greed, and fuck fundamentals. Main thing is, if something makes sense, don't do it. America's in the all-time shit, and Wall Street's oblivious. It's like everybody's bidding up standing room on the Tttanic. But who cares? You play options like I do and all you have to worry about is not getting stupider than the herd. Which ain't necessarily much of a trick."

Stock options, he went on to assert, were like having a credit card in a whorehouse-a ton of action for what amounted to tip money up front. No wonder Las Vegas was in trouble, when Wall Street was beckoning our high rollers to take odds on the direction of the market. Only widows and orphans, he observed, bought actual securities anymore. That action was reserved for the halt and lame.

While country singers twanged beer hall soliloquies on the general increase in faithless women, Jim Bob coded in the brokerage houses and offshore banks we'd be using, the catalog of stocks in the DNI portfolio, and our sequence of transactions.

As noted earlier, the financial setup had been handled by Henderson and friends. Using his connections, he'd opened accounts for hundreds of dummy corporations in about two dozen offshore banks. He stuck to the usual no-questions-asked operations like Banca della Svizzera Italiana and Bank Leu in the Bahamas-the latter a Swiss-owned Nassau laundry that had, in years past, reportedly destroyed records and lied to the Securities and Exchange Commission as a favor to certain of America's more inventive inside traders.

Since the volume of money to be moved was staggering, it would all be handled by sophisticated telecommunications networks. We would pass it through the anonymous accounts we'd established, accessed both ways by computer, and it would never be touched by human hands. DNI's cash would flash in and out with total cover. Added to that, anybody who tried to trace us would first have to break through a traditional Swiss stone wall.

To dump the stock we were planning to exploit fully the new "globalization" of the financial scene. Now that the National Association of Securities Dealers had struck a deal with the London and Tokyo stock exchanges to swap price quotes, worldwide market makers were buying and selling American securities around the clock. Plenty of active market-making was happening off the exchange floors as well, at places like Jeffries out on the coast, which had recently handled a massive Canadian takeover of an American company overnight, entirely off-exchange. With all the avenues available it was almost impossible to track the movement in a given issue. DNI's computers would be routing sell orders to brokerage firms around the globe, a block here, a block there, none of them in quantities that would raise eyebrows.

Maybe I also should add that none of the "corporations" Henderson had set up would be allowed to show a profit, which would simplify Treasury Department reporting requirements. As a matter of fact, before we were through, DNI was going to lose billions. But it would all be done legally, in accordance with SEC regs. It would also lead to a world financial flap of notable proportions. Nobody would ever take Noda's money for granted again.

While Tam went over her new program with Jim Bob, pointing out her special features, Henderson and I found ourselves at reasonably loose ends. We sat around drinking green tea (God, how I came to hate that stuff) and puzzling how we'd all managed to get into such a mess. The major plus, however, was that we finally had Matsuo Noda by the short and curlies.

Or so we hoped. The problem was, he'd been a player longer than any of us, and he'd already demonstrated plenty of stamina. How would he counterattack? The question wasn't if, it was when. For the moment, though, we seemed to be on our way with clear sailing; in fact, the communications link with Kyoto was entirely empty. Tanaka also had clammed up, refusing to talk-beyond a rather firm prediction that our wholesale divestiture of DNI's assets was an insane act doomed to failure. I might also add he didn't appear nearly as concerned as the circumstances would seem to merit. In fact, he was so complacent I started getting a little uneasy. Finally Bill and I ran his prediction past young Jim Bob. Could somebody get through to Tam's program and devise a way to shut us down?

Henderson's increasingly glassy-eyed protege took out enough time from popping "uppers" and swilling Coors to assure us to the contrary.

"Hell, no way you could stop what we're settin' up here. We got ourselves what you call a closed system. Everything's going to be handled by that green-eyed monster over there in the corner. We got these numbered brokerage accounts all over the place. Zip, in go the sell orders; zap, out go confirmations. And since none of the cash sits around, our bank accounts are all just gonna churn. We'll have billions of buckaroos rollin' at the speed of light. Ain't nobody gonna be able to get a bead on the action, take my word for it."

Our computer-generated buying and selling, he went on to declare, was conveniently similar in appearance to the "program" trading of the big institutional investors, the arbitrage players who routinely sold millions of dollars of securities in minutes using computers. Thanks to them, the market these days had been conditioned to accept huge, unaccountable trades as part of the territory. If somebody dumped massive blocks of stock unexpectedly, it could mean anything-such as, the spread between those stocks' prices and some "index future" had gotten momentarily out of sync. Shuffling securities like poker chips was the name of the game on the Street these days, so nobody would really notice or care. The turnover we'd be generating would merely suggest to the market that various investment-house arbitrage desks were unwinding positions.

What the heck, I said to Tam, maybe we could unload the better part of DNI's holdings before Noda struck back. The real key to our attack on Dai Nippon, however, depended on what happened to that cash after we turned it around. When I mentioned that, she just crossed her fingers.