trdrbear: ok

trdrbear: what do you want to do?

Weber: size

I had to stop this.

What was I going to do? I couldn’t physically go in Weber’s office. He kept it locked, at least, since he started going crazy. Should I call some securities regulator and tell them that the proprietor of a hedge fund was trying to lose money? There was nothing against the law about losing money. And besides, his efforts to lose money over the last year had only resulted in: more money.

But maybe that wasn’t the right explanation. Maybe Weber really was a genius. And, maybe he knew precisely when the market was going to finally crash, and he would completely reverse his portfolio and go short. That seemed unlikely, though: from the moment I met Weber, I knew that bullishness was in his blood: he was an optimist. That’s usually the way it is on Wall Street; people are wired to make money being optimistic, or pessimistic, but not both. Weber was a hermit, but he had faith in the economy, in free trade, in capitalism. And he had been right for years. It was hard to imagine him waking up one morning changing his mind.

There was only one place I was going to be able to execute the trade. Savage was the best tech vol trader on the street, even though he was a giant douche. The problem was that Boone Dog, the safest hands, was off the desk, and I was going to have to deal with the New Girl, who, to my knowledge, had never handled anything bigger than a 100-lot. But Weber was going to want someone to commit capital on the deal, and Savage was the only one with the balls to do it. No other bank was going to be willing to stick its neck out in a fast market on a toxic deal. But I also knew that Boone Dog would throw her a bone if she did well, and I liked the idea of seeing her get paid.

trdrbear: hey

nderivs: hey

trdrbear: pick me up

“Hello,” she said.

“Hey, we’re going to want to play the spinoff.”

“What spinoff?”

Holy Christ, she is young. “Man alive, I didn’t think you got that drunk last night. You read the paper? 3Com spinning off Palm.”

“Oh.”

“You know? Palm Pilot? Wake up, sweetheart.”

“Ha. Yeah.”

“I need you to be Johnny On The Spot for this. Weber is like, out of his tree this morning.”

“Still not talking?”

“No. But he IM’d me and said he wanted to be size in this spinoff.”

“You know what he’s doing?”

“No.”

“Ok bye.”

I knew as soon as she hung up the phone that she was going to go talk to Savage, the douche.

I felt rage coming up through the carpet, through my shoes, into my hands again. My whole life was completely out of control. I had no control over Katharine. I had no control over this job; if Weber blew us up, I had no money to pay lawyers, and I lose the children, the house, and everything. I could see the Page Six headlines now: Weber’s head trader, bankrupt, living in a tent. You always hear about these rich CEO idiots who had gone through all their money by the time the thing came crashing down. I had become a giant cliché.