My life, right now, is like this trading floor. Almost everything is switched off. All entries and exits are closed. Only a few lights are still working—Gouri, family … nothing else. The silence of disaster all around me. No one here to help. No one to talk to. No hope. Nothing.

Still … I have to work.

Anyway. Life must carry on. And at least right now I have a Spark Of Brilliance.

SOB: Suddenly I remembered Andre and Brussels. Why don’t I just take the entire LLTLF corpus and invest it in the US housing market? And I don’t even need to do any research. Andre told us everything. Given the amount of money Bore Atlantic is making, not only will I be able to get the money out Tom’s and my hands, I will probably also end up making a lot of money for LLTLF. So at least there is that positive outcome. (And it is a good deed. Hopefully god will show some mercy.)

I’ve spent the last couple of hours going through opportunities in the US housing market. I didn’t understand a single thing. There are housing companies and banks and mortgage lenders and all kinds of things. Then I tried searching for Credit Derivative Default things. It looks like English, it reads like English. Didn’t understand a single fucking thing.

Frustrated. But I have a plan for tomorrow. I need to enter the US housing market somehow.

Leaving for home now.

7 July 2007

1.05 p.m.

Fucking Isle of Man bastard. No sense of urgency, no sense of customer service, nothing. And stupid accent on top of that.

So I called him up from my mobile phone and used the login ID that Tom gave me. He asked me what I wanted to do with the money. I asked him if he could invest it in the US housing market for me. He laughed and told me I had to be a lot more specific than that. I asked him for suggestions of good investments in the sector. He told me to call back when I knew what I was talking about.

Fuck.

What to do now?

Anyway roast beef in the canteen. So lunch first.

3.23 p.m.

Lunch was a failure.

Food was good. But now the rumours are beginning to spread. Half the people in the canteen were talking about the FarmersCard acquisition. Hassan explained it to me. Apparently in 2006 Lederman decided to acquire a company called FarmersCard in the US. They were a small credit card and loan issuer that was profitable, but very low profile. However Lederman bought it for a huge amount of money. Tom, it seems, was very enthusiastic about it and managed to convince the board of directors. However in general the media thought that Lederman had paid too much for it. Some $400 million, mostly in cash.