Assaf Gavron - The Hilltop

His brother, Roni, saw the light, too, in New York. Two thousand six was a good year for him. He enjoyed the work, Eliot Lieberman had been a little over-the-top with the cryptic warnings, but Roni’s days were indeed stressful: long hours in front of seven screens, almost without breaks during the New York trading hours, and half an eye squinting in their direction while trading was going on in the rest of the world, not to mention the dozens of e-mails from brokers and team members, to which he replied only after getting home, sometimes at midnight or one in the morning, after an evening out with colleagues. Those evenings weren’t for having fun, it was work; the never-ending effort to establish a social standing, glean gossip and tips, keep a finger on the pulse. Roni didn’t sleep much.

Roni’s trump card was his Israeli connections. They were networked across the entire continent, not only in the world of finance but also in industry, the energy firms, and of course in tech. He established his ties quickly and diligently, made sure to cultivate them and secure information before it was published, and to convert that information into deals. He then went on to trade himself, too — and after he made a name for himself as a gutsy, quick-witted, and mostly profitable trader, a fair number of Israelis, from the Hummus Forum and others, entrusted him with their investment portfolios. For the bankers and techies who knew nothing about stocks but had money to invest, Roni was the right guy, he spoke the right language and yielded the right profits.

Someone noted during one of the first seminars Roni attended at the Hummus Forum that a talent for winging it — a skill Israelis always prized — wasn’t held in high regard in the United States. There was no cutting corners with them, they said, everything was by the book. They respected everyone, everyone got an equal opportunity, and they expected everyone to play fairly by the rules. That was the reason, it was said, why the American economy was so prosperous and attracted the finest minds from around the world, including ours. Wheeling, dealing, and scheming Israeli-style may sometimes help, in the short term, but there was no substitute for fair play and orderly work. But as he gained experience, Roni’s opinion began to change. He learned that while perhaps many Americans don’t cut corners, the Indians and Koreans and Croats — and some Americans, too — did in fact cut a corner or two, and he came to observe that on more than one occasion those corner-cutters left the honest Americans lagging far behind.

At one of the Hummus Forum gatherings, Idan Lowenhof asked Roni, “Remember Bronco?” Idan squeezed the shoulder of a short, pug-nosed guy. “Should I remember him?” responded Roni as he shook a firm hand. Bronco was part of Idan’s team in the commando unit, was wounded and left for the 8200 intelligence unit before Roni arrived. Nevertheless, two or three minutes of conversation was all it took for them to find enough common acquaintances to share some laughs. In the army Bronco was Yoni, but now he called himself Jonathan and worked in Silicon Valley, at an Israeli-owned company that provided location services. He regularly traveled the San Francisco — New York — Israel circuit, and would stop by the Hummus Forum once every few weeks. Once, after Roni and Bronco spent an evening drinking beer, Bronco said, “I have a craving for sushi.”

Roni took him to Sushi Yasuda in Midtown, and after topping up the beer in their bellies with warm sake, they hopped into a cab to the Ulysses pub and chilled the sake with Guinness. They were in an advanced state of drunkenness when they began shooting pool. In the middle of the game, Bronco picked up a red ball and said, “You know this was once the tusk of an elephant?” Roni chuckled. “Once,” Bronco continued, “they used to make the balls out of wood.” Roni hit the white ball into a red one, which shot into one of the pockets.

“You know where I saw wooden balls?” Roni paid no attention to the drunken jabbering, and Jonathan answered his own question. “At Googleplex. They have this amazing old-school table.”

Roni, bent over the green table, raised his eyes. “What were you doing at Google?” he asked, his curiosity drawing him momentarily out of the fog of the Guinness.

“Oops, I didn’t say a thing.” Jonathan Bronco giggled and mimed zipping his mouth shut. “My turn now?”

That same night, despite his inebriation, Roni canvassed the Web and reviewed the data, and he came to an unequivocal conclusion: Google was set to purchase Bronco’s location services company. The following day he traded and invested accordingly. He spoke with the manager of his portfolio, Dale Savage, and received a onetime approval to exceed his trading budget. Announcement of the acquisition came the following week. To the Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss clients, and to his Israeli friends, it was worth a lot of money.

Over the next year Roni received a few more tips from Bronco and from others, some inadvertent and alcohol-based at Ulysses, some with greater intent. The gamble he took on Google’s negative fourth-quarter earnings report was based on a mixture of sharp wits, luck, and the balls of a bull. Bronco dropped something he had heard, Roni crossed it with reports he read and with a conversation he’d had with a classmate who worked at an investment bank in California. This time he didn’t request approval, and traded in sums that exceeded his ceiling. The bank and its clients earned $8.5 million from the short-position gamble on a drop in price that he took on the Google stock.

One evening in January, Eliot Lieberman called him in for a talk. When he walked into the office, Dale Savage was there, too. Roni could feel his heart in his throat. Employees had been told that an announcement on the bonuses for the previous year was expected only in February, so he figured he’d been summoned on some other matter. They both appeared stern-faced. He was sure they were onto him, that they’d reviewed his portfolio and realized that he wouldn’t have achieved the successes he had achieved without inside information and without deviating from his trading budget. That the supervisory mechanisms entrusted with ensuring fair trading had picked up on his activities.

“Sit,” Dale said, and ran a hand through his straight blond hair. Roni sat, ill at ease.

“You’ve caught our attention, Roni,” Dale continued. Roni noticed out of the corner of his eye that Lieberman was nodding. “You had a nice year. Several impressive deals that earned us a decent sum.”

“And more importantly,” Lieberman said, “you’ve shown you know how to manage risks; you don’t panic when the market goes crazy.”

Here it comes, Roni thought, and lowered his head slightly, almost ready to raise his hands to defend himself.

“Your bonus for two thousand six is two hundred and seventy-five thousand dollars. Just so you’re aware: it’s one of the biggest bonuses we’ve given to traders in their first year with the company. You deserve it.” Roni waited for the “but” that was about to come, but it didn’t come. “We’ve decided to increase your investment budget,” Dale Savage went on, “and to give you more freedom to be aggressive, in order for you to present us with an even better number next year. So go out there and own that desk, big man, pull the strings you pulled this year, work your fine network, go out and grab them by the balls!” By the time he got to the last sentence, Dale was shouting, and when he was done, he stood and began clapping. Lieberman joined in, although he remained seated. Roni didn’t know what to do, so he smiled and looked from one executive to the other.

He continued to shine in 2007. Jonathan Bronco showed up at the Hummus Forum less and less, and Roni’s efforts to contact him were met with a somewhat chilly reception, but other opportunities arose. One, to Roni’s surprise, came via Meir Foriner. Foriner — the guy from Savyon he had studied with, and who had turned Roni off with his rich-boy blue-eyed arrogance and his groveling at the feet of the Americans. Foriner, like Tal Paritzky, Roni’s friend from Kfar Shmaryahu, was a regular at the Hummus Forum. As time went by, Roni got the feeling they wanted to cozy up to him, which wasn’t surprising — his success at Goldstein-Lieberman-Weiss and in managing the investment portfolios of a number of the forum members wasn’t a secret.