Teddy Wayne - Kapitoil

In my pod I set Kapitoil to aggregate recent newspaper searches, and it predicts oil futures will rise 21 cents total by the end of the day. This is only a 0.95 % change, but that is still a good amount, and it is more critical to show that the program works. I immediately enter an anonymous order for 5,000 barrels at the current price of $22.17.

For the first two hours the oil price rises slowly as Kapitoil predicted. I watch it, although I do not focus well on my work.

Then at 11:45 a.m. the price drops. I hope this is temporary turbulence, and monitor the prices more closely.

At lunch Dan and Jefferson make a wager for $200 that Dan cannot eat 12 donuts in five minutes. The rules are he may have one glass of milk and may not eject the donuts during the consumption, although he may afterward. He eats six ASAP, then slows down. He eats the tenth donut very slowly, and he has one minute to finish the final two.

“Dan, you don’t have to do this,” Rebecca says.

“Yeah, let’s call it even,” says Jefferson, who looks slightly nervous.

Dan shakes his head and eats his 11th donut. “30 seconds left,” Jefferson says. Dan shifts back and holds his desk for stability. He eats half the donut, then looks at the remaining half. With 15 seconds left, he puts the donut in his mouth and intakes it. His throat broadens as if it is a snake consuming a bird. Then he runs to the restroom and remains there for 20 minutes.

I review my monitor. Oil futures are now lower than the original $22.17.

The price continues falling through the afternoon, and at the end of open outcry at 2:30 p.m. it is 23 cents below the original price. I am interested exclusively in short-term gains and do not want to invest more money in this contract, so I sell it to someone at $21.94 and lose $1,150 on the sale.

Mr. Ray emails me:

We’ll try it out again tomorrow. These things don’t always work right away. Am withdrawing 100K from your account.

Except I believed it would work right away, and now I am afraid I have already trashed my one opportunity here and I will never come up with an idea that works and I will be a nonentity in finance my whole life.

On the subway after work I do not feel like immediately returning home, so I transfer trains and ride uptown until I reach Central Park. It is already dark at 6:00 p.m. and getting colder. I enter the park and walk without knowing where I am directed, and find a bench on a wide pedestrian road underneath leaves that blend red and orange and yellow.

A female walks by pushing a stroller with a baby inside. She is Middle Eastern, possibly Iranian, and looks like my mother when she was younger, with the same nose I also have, thin with a small angle in the middle, which some people might evaluate as ugly on a female but I think is elegant on the correct face. I stand up, but she is already beyond me, so I walk behind her and to the side to observe her features.

She turns her head and looks back at me, then accelerates the stroller.

“Miss, please do not run away,” I say as I also accelerate. “I notice that you look very similar—”

“Leave me alone,” she says, and she turns the stroller to where other people are. I stop following her and turn back.

In my apartment, I retrieve from my top desk drawer a small photograph of my mother. I am approximately seven years old and sitting on her lap. Her eyes are bright holes against her dark burqa as she laughs.

It is my solitary photograph of her, and I wish I had additional ones, but by the time we knew we should take more, her body had lost much mass and her skin was gray and her hair was voided in partitions and the corners of her forehead angled in because she had no muscles. But she never complained about her health. The only subject she complained about was one time when I heard her crying on the telephone and telling my aunt that she would not get to see Zahira grow up. In some ways that is better, since Zahira was not old enough to 100 % understand what was happening, but in most ways it was not, because now she says she has few memories of her, and memories are the only way for someone who is dead to continue approximately living.

And although I am glad I possess this photograph, it also frustrates me, because I have no idea now what happened before it to make her laugh, or what happened after, and it captures an infinitely small moment out of her entire life, and although I have other memories of her, they are slowly being deleted, e.g., when I was young and had difficulty falling asleep she used to sing Beatles songs in English to me. I can remember with accuracy the sound of her cream of the cream voice, and if she had been born in the U.S., I predict she would have been a musician.

But I do not remember what her preferred song was that she frequently sang ultimately, just before she kissed my forehead. I have played nearly every song of theirs for years to launch my memory, but I am never certain which one it is. My father would not remember, and even if he did, we do not discuss her.

green-light = permit a project to continue

highly privileged information = private data

play on words = create a secondary or tertiary meaning via original usage of language

On Thursday Kapitoil predicts that prices will drop 15 cents, so I short a contract for 5,000 barrels. Before I make the transaction, I review Kapitoil’s prediction and the data that support it, in case I can decipher why it has been erroneous. But I do not detect any glitches: It is using the most recent newspaper articles in the U.S. from this morning and should be accurate.

The prices drop at first, as the program predicted, but then they fluctuate during the day, and by the end of open outcry it is up 17 cents and we again lose money.

Mr. Ray emails me:

One more chance tomorrow, or we’ll have to kill it.

I strike my desk hard, and Rebecca looks at me. “I am having a technical issue,” I say.

Several minutes later, Jefferson disconnects his telephone. “Scored two tickets, mezzanine, game three of the World Series,” he says. “Check the weather for the 26th.”

Dan clicks on his computer. “Damn. 70 % chance of rain.”

Jefferson says, “Don’t be so pessimistic, baby. That’s your problem. October weather goes through volatile ch-ch-ch-changes,” and he sings this last word as he intentionally stutters.

And then I have a positive short circuit about why my program is malfunctioning, or instead why it functions at first and then stops: because it is processing articles written the previous night and published in the morning. But by the afternoon it is obsolete news, which is why Kapitoil performs poorly then. The Internet is a constant source of data, like a spacious bin the entire world is depositing trash inside, and my program is calibrated so precisely that it must process the most recent data: the trash on top . The trash underneath is less valuable.

The solitary way to profit with it, I hypothesize, is to make transactions and run Kapitoil every hour, although this poses great risk for major losses.

“Karim, check us out on TV Tuesday night,” Jefferson says.

I am frustrated that he is interrupting me when I am in the middle of an important thought, so I say, “I will, if you are not obstructed by the people sitting in front of you.” He does not understand this is a reference to his height, and resumes working.

I shoot Mr. Ray my idea. He agrees it is high risk, but green-lights me to try this new hourly strategy tomorrow.

I receive an email from Rebecca at 5:45 p.m.:

Interested in seeing the movie “Three Kings” tonight? (Short notice, I know, but I figure you’re busy next week trying to spot Jefferson on TV in vain-the camera only adds ten pounds, not ten inches.)