Teddy Wayne: Kapitoil

5. Therefore, if I can collect enough data like this, I can gain a major advantage over others who are merely using obvious data that are front-page news.

Because this central idea is truly an analog to scanning unobserved partitions of a Pollock painting, I am able to piggyback it onto my previous program. I also link it to the newspaper search engine. It is taxing (although it takes less time because of the previous program), but it is the class of labor I enjoy.

The nighttime janitor cleans as I program, and when I give her my trash bin, it is the solitary time I look away from my monitor.

In fact, only when I am nearly finished and my cursor is on the word “casualties” do I evaluate the big picture of what I am creating. When violence occurs, especially in the Middle East, my program will attempt to leverage it for financial gain. But this violence will happen with or without my program. Therefore, by making money, the program produces at least some positives from a very negative situation. It turns the violence into a zero-sum game, because the money and violence cancel each other out, instead of producing exclusively a negative game.

I decide to complete the program.

I finally stop near 3:30 a.m., and I notice I have been alone for several hours and I have not eaten dinner. I am not even that hungry, but I purchase an apple from a vending machine. Typically when I am programming like this at home, Zahira forces me to consume food because I forget.

My program is finally functional, although I do not know how accurate it is until it sifts historical data. I direct it to use data from the last six months and to make oil futures predictions on each day as if it were truly that day.

It will have to number-crunch overnight, so I leave my computer on but turn my monitor off and open a spreadsheet so others will not identify the true labor of the computer, and then I go home and wait until the morning to discover if my program is successful.

backwater = an unimportant or unsophisticated location

incinerate = burn down

jack up = inflate prices

jackass = stupid person; Dan

major-league favor = significant favor

I do not sleep the entire night. At 6:00 a.m. I get out of bed and decide to go to a mosque, as that is a profitable destination when my brain is overstimulated, and my program at work will not be ready until probably 8:30 a.m. The other mosques near my office and apartment are adequate, but it is time for me to visit the chief mosque in New York.

I take the subway to the Islamic Cultural Center on the Upper East Side. It is as attractive as I have read, with a dome and Turkish architecture that resembles the Hagia Sophia with sharper lines.

The prayer hall has tall glass windows and pure white walls and hanging cords creating a circle with lights attached to the end, like an inverted birthday cake with candles. There are no columns inside, and the dome is simple but elegant, and the patterns on the carpet have a complex repeating pattern. This is what I want my programming to have: mathematical precision that is also beautiful. As a parallel, Jackson Pollock’s paintings are beautiful even though they are not precise, but by being so imprecise they are also in a way precise.

Half of the men are black, and in one corner men in robes read the Koran together. I consider partnering with them, but I want to be alone with my prayers now.

Once I begin praying I do forget about my program. It is as if saying words to Allah mutes all the calculations and ideas that are making noise inside my head and transports me to the spiritual world that is non-numbered, and performing the actions I have performed thousands of times reminds me of my body, which is also non-numbered, which is why I also enjoy racquetball.

After an hour I am recharged. On the subway to work I observe all the businessmen reading The Wall Street Journal who are trying to find ways to decipher the stock market. Maybe I have done so with oil futures.

Jefferson said Schrub’s programs yield 3–4 % above market returns for yearly returns. So I hope to gain 5 % above market returns on oil futures based on historical data, with minimal risk. This will mean a minimal average daily return above market, approximately 0.02 %, but it is like the way a child becomes taller: You do not observe daily growth.

My podmates are not in yet. My hands vibrate slightly as I approach my desk and power on my monitor.

I close the spreadsheet window above my program. There are many numbers on the monitor, and I still need to do some calculations to receive the final results.

For overnight predictions, which means the user trades immediately in the morning and trades again at the end of the workday, my program correctly predicts the converted price of oil futures on that day within a 12 % error, e.g., if oil rises $1, then 68 % of the time my program predicts that prices will rise between 88 cents and $1.12. On the historical data, this means its average daily profit on oil futures is 1.1 %.

There must be an error, so I reenter the calculations.

It is again 1.1 %.

I try to sit very still although I am vibrating even more. I will not say anything about this yet before I know it truly works. I cannot risk humiliating myself again.

Dan enters the pod, so I reopen the spreadsheet window in case he sees the program, although he will not understand what it is. He turns on his monitor. His computer has been downloading music overnight without paying for it. He does that frequently, which is not only illegal normally but is even more illegal to do at work. The current song is titled “Mashup — Livin’ La Beasta Burden (Livin’ La Vida Loca vs. Beast of Burden).”

An error range of 12 % is impressive, but I must refine the program to gain even higher average returns and minimize risk. I cannot resist, and I start recoding a section.

“What are you slaving away at?” Rebecca asks.

I am so focused on my work that I did not hear her enter and I left the program observable. Rebecca might understand it more than Dan and Jefferson do.

I consider revealing my project to her. But there is no way to do it quietly without Dan and Jefferson hearing, and they would understand the idea when translated to English.

In addition I am afraid she will again think I am interested exclusively in money.

“It is only some number-crunching,” I say, and close the windows.

Later in the day Rebecca strikes her hand on her keyboard. “Fucking machine,” she says quietly.

“Are you having a technical issue?” I ask.

“Yes, I’m having a technical issue. How’d you guess, Karim?” she says. Then she adds, “Ignore me. It’s not your fault. I’m just having a hard time dealing right now.”

She explains that there is a virus in a spreadsheet she has been working on for several hours which prevents her from accessing it.

“I have some experience with viruses,” I say.

First I quarantine the document in our pod’s recycle bin, which is stored on a separate drive, so that it cannot impact any other important documents. It is a class of virus I am familiar with, so I approximately know how to proceed.

But as I fix it, I notice a document in the recycle bin: “market prediction.doc.” It must be Jefferson’s refined version of my first program proposal. I open it.

The document looks similar to what I gave Jefferson although with slightly enhanced language, but the end does not include my name, as I originally wrote. In fact, it does not include anyone’s name.

I define two possible theories: (1)At Schrub New York it is considered unprofessional to include your name at the bottom of a proposal, and Jefferson told the higher-up (whose name I read is George Ray) that I was the programmer, or (2)Jefferson claimed responsibility for my program and pretended it was his.