I started the fund in an office park in Westport. Our office was next door to a bankruptcy lawyer who wore American flag ties and farted audibly. I hired CN away from a second-tier bank, a payout shop. I hired him because he was the type of guy to keep all his change in a jar and take it to the bank at the end of the year. I could have hired smarter traders. I didn’t want someone complex. He would take the Yankees tickets from the brokers and be happy, sit in the box seats, wearing a Mattingly jersey. We worked out of cubicles for a few years, getting hoagies for lunch, punching the Subway Club Card to get the free sandwich at the end of the week.

I am trying to surf the web for news, but it is loading too slowly, the pictures scrolling down from top to bottom. It’s funny that we’ve had this whole internet bubble in the stock market, because at these connection speeds, the web is still pretty useless.

I’m in a better mood than I thought I would be. I think I turned a corner last night, when Boone Dog’s car dropped me off at the office. As I sat there in the town car, the driver waiting patiently for me to leave, eyeing me in the rear view mirror, I just had the overwhelming feeling that I had done this all before, probably my two thousandth broker dinner and town car ride, going back to the office to trade Asia, the two thousandth time I have done that, trading the same Japanese banks, over and over again. Ten years of my life, some of my twenties and most of my thirties, gone, checking quotes every minute I’m away from the desk, calling brokers from the backs of cars, from dinners, even from the two vacations I took.

I’ll miss what it was like to win. Winning was hard, in the beginning. Like when CN and I were working out in that cube farm and we had this massive day, and the fund was up 4 percent from close to close, we were high-fiving each other. We had made six figures in a day. We were all smiles after that one, before we really understood that it wasn’t enough. I learned that running a hedge fund was like running that stupid magazine—I spent more time marketing, trying to gather assets than I did trading, putting on a suit, hitting the road, answering stupid questions. Eventually I just gave up. The fund is mostly my money, now. It could have been CN’s, too, if he reinvested it, but he let his wife spend it all.

The first time I got called by a reporter, he asked me why I thought people hated me so much.

If I search for my name on Yahoo!, I find: 1. An article about how little I give to charity, 2. An article about how I am supposedly gay, and 3. 4. 5. 6. Articles about how I am almost certainly engaging in insider trading. It’s hard to photograph me going to work—the boundary of the property is far from the street, and wooded—but sometimes people try. Brokers have to take great precautions, like in restaurants. Boone Dog knows this. The dinner was on a need-to-know basis at the firm, a car takes me to and from, and we have a private room. Sometimes out a back entrance.