Teddy Wayne - Kapitoil

“You sure?” she asks.

“Yes. You will see. The waitress will not present us with a check.”

The waitress arrives in a minute to retrieve our plates. “Thanks a lot, guys. Have a nice night,” she says.

“Thank you, Karim,” Rebecca says.

“You do not have to thank me. It was a random accident that we won.”

“Thanks, anyway,” she says. “Randomly and accidentally.”

We walk to the Chambers St. subway station that we can both use, although I am going uptown and she is going to Brooklyn. My entrance is across the street from hers. She stands at the top of the stairs.

“This was fun. We both work a little too hard. You especially,” she says. “Let’s see if we can’t do it more often.”

“I would enjoy that,” I say. “But let us see if we can do it more often.”

She looks confused. “That’s what I said.”

“You said, ‘Let us see if we can’t do it more often.’”

She says, “That’s an idiom. It means ‘Let’s see if we can do whatever.’”

“Why would you employ the negative when the intention is a positive?” I ask.

“Maybe to make it seem like you’re not fully invested in it?” she says. “Not that I don’t care. I don’t know what I’m saying, I’m rambling.” We pause for several seconds. “Well,” she says, then puts out her hand, “have a good night,” and she shakes my hand hard like we are at a business meeting and quickly descends the steps.

I enter my subway, and by then she is reading a book on a bench at a distant end of the station. Her forehead is very concentrated most of the time with a small compression in it and sometimes she smiles to herself at what she is reading and once she even laughs quietly to herself, which I have never done while reading, but that is because I read financial books, which are humorless. She does not notice me, and I keep observing her until her train arrives, and through the window I see the back of her head and the subway light mirroring the top of her hair like a silver crown until she disappears into the tunnel, and then I listen again on my voice recorder to her saying “Well…have a good night” multiple times to decipher it, because frequently it is not the words themselves that matter but the way they are said.

are you still working on that = are you still continuing to eat a meal

grab a bite = get something to eat

homesick = missing home so much as if it were an illness

invested in = care about

kill it = terminate services

let’s see if we can’t do = let’s see if we can do

On Friday morning I greet Rebecca, and she tells me again that she had a good time last night. Dan enters, and she says, “Time to put our noses to the grindstone.”

At 9:00 a.m. Kapitoil predicts the price of oil will rise 6 cents. I buy a contract. Kapitoil looks similar to other programs I am running, so my podmates do not know what I am doing.

At 10:00 a.m. the price of oil is up 4 cents. I sell the contract and we profit.

I immediately run Kapitoil again and put more weight on articles written in the last 90 minutes. It has a new prediction: down 3 cents. I short a contract.

At 11:30 oil is down 4 cents and we again profit.

I email Mr. Ray that we have made two consecutive profits on the hourly transactions. He green-lights me to continue until 5:15 p.m.

I make five more transactions during the day and profit on all of them. At closing time we have made 1.6 % profit even though the ending price is only a few cents higher than the original price.

I decipher the reason it was malfunctioning. With the historical data, the program used newspaper articles written through the entire day and averaged them collectively to predict the closing price, but in practice I was using articles published in the morning. It was a foolish but understandable error: When you initially succeed without resistance, you sometimes overlook serious problems that may appear later. When people face challenges, however, they innovate more, e.g., in the way that the mother of a poorer family may produce a complete dinner out of minimal and inexpensive ingredients.

I can now revise the program’s potential. Because the market can vacillate approximately 0.5 % every hour, if Kapitoil operates at full efficiency, it can achieve up to 4.0 % daily average profits during standard business hours. Over four weeks, assuming maximum vacillation and optimal predictive ability, this equals profits of 219 %.

Mr. Ray emails me at 5:30 p.m.:

Nice work today. Finesse the program some more over the weekend, and let’s do it again on Monday. I’ll replace the 100K in your account.

Mr. Ray does not seem like the class of higher-up who frequently provides compliments, so for him to write “Nice work today” means very much to me. I almost forward his email to Zahira, but I do not want her to know about the program, both because (1)it may still not function and I do not want her to think I am a failure, as she considers me the smartest person she knows, even though I believe she is probably smarter than I am, which normally bothers me but not when it is Zahira, and (2)Kapitoil must remain highly privileged information.

After Dan and Jefferson leave, Rebecca puts on her blue wool hat and coat. “You up to anything fun this weekend?” she asks.

I will be refining Kapitoil to operate at full efficiency, but I cannot tell her that. I also do not want to lie 100 %, so I say, “I will be laboring on some projects.”

She crashes her hand against her head as if we are in the military. “At ease, then.”

Over the weekend I finesse Kapitoil. I am focused, but several times on Saturday night I wonder what Rebecca is doing, e.g., is she at an event, is she with friends, or is she alone like I am.

finesse = labor on for enhancement

put one’s nose to the grindstone = labor intensively

On Monday morning Kapitoil continues generating hourly profits. By noon, out of a possible 2.1 % profit based on how much the oil futures have vacillated per hour, we have made a 1.7 % profit, which is not full efficiency but is still robust.

Mr. Ray emails me:

Meet me in the conference room on 89 at 1:30.

Possibly he has reconsidered that Kapitoil might still be too risky. There are rumors that layoffs will soon occur, and maybe they do not have the money to continue high-risk programs like mine.

Or possibly they do not even have the money to retain me as an employee.

I omit lunch because my stomach is turbulent, as it frequently becomes when I am anxious, and do not run Kapitoil at noon, because I do not want it to lose money suddenly and give Mr. Ray more reason to kill it.

At 1:30 I knock on the door of the conference room. Mr. Ray says “Come in” from inside, and I open the door.

He is sitting, and at the head of the table is an older man. He has tan skin and black and white hair, and his nose slightly curves down like a vertical asymptote. His suit is gray and blue and his tie is dark red like blood that has dried.

It is Mr. Schrub.

“Karim,” he says. He stands and extends to a few inches taller than I am. “Glad to meet you.”

I am afraid to look into his eyes as we shake hands, so I look at his red tie. “It is my honor to meet you, Mr. Schrub.”

Mr. Schrub puts out his arm to signal his permission to sit down opposite Mr. Ray.

“George tells me,” he says, “that you can see the future.”

I look at Mr. Ray for help, but he is not looking back at me. “The program has been successful so far at predicting pricing variance,” I say.