I get hate mail sometimes, death threats. Not often.

Half hour until CN gets here.

I’d better get ready.

* * * *

When CN told me about the dinner at Sparks with the Kensington crew a few weeks ago, I was up for it. It’s not a good use of my time, but I need to get out of the office every once in a while. People think that Wall Street is some kind of Wild West of guys ripping each other’s faces off, but that’s not true. The banking industry is based on trust. I did a plurality of my trading at Kensington because of trust. CN and I have done tests with brokers, to see how much information leaks out. We’ve measured execution quality, to see if people are front-running our orders. Kensington was virtually airtight, at least until an option order got to the floor. I would have traded with them more, but I needed to spread money around to get access to research. Boone Dog was going to pump me for my market views at the dinner, in his own subtle way, by engaging in polite conversation, exchanging ideas, which was fine—he trades on information—and I wanted to do the same. I wanted to know what all his dopey clients were doing, so I could do the opposite.

But when CN reminded me yesterday afternoon

trdrbear: Dinner tonight Kensington boys Sparks car will be here at 5 don’t forget

My heart sank. I was no longer in the mood. About a month ago, CN had made an error—I had given him an order to liquidate our position in an optical networking stock before earnings, but he accidentally bought instead of sold, doubling our position, and the stock was up thirty percent on earnings. We ended up making well over seven figures on an error. It occurred to me that I nearly always made money on errors. Over the last month, I realized that I’d spent almost a decade fighting tooth and nail to make money, and then it occurred to me that it was no longer a struggle to make money—it had become like eating or breathing. Instead, it had become difficult to lose money. So a few weeks ago, I conducted an experiment—I bought shares of a company so crappy, so fraudulent, that it was sure to go down: Boo.com.

Within two days, I did a double.

I understood perfectly well why this happened. My trades leak and people copy them, buying stock behind me, which forces the price up. Therefore, everything I buy is going to go up. But it happened even on trades that I sent to Kensington, so it couldn’t be just that, it had to be luck, which was the point of the exercise—why was I lucky—all the time?

So for the last three weeks, I’ve been buying the trashiest, dumbest stocks in the world—Microstrategy, Lastminute.com, Freeinternet.com—and they all went up. In fact, we were having a record quarter. I’ve always been a technology bull, but I always bought real companies, not garbage. CN has noticed. There’s a pause, after I send him the orders on IM. But I know these companies are frauds, so I hold on to them as long as I can—figuring they will go down eventually—but they don’t. They only go down after I sell them.