Schoen Fayre Invested could boast neither a Mr. Fayre nor a Herr Schoen—the name being chosen at great expense through professional image consultants, to inspire the maximum amount of positive connotations in its client base. It was a new, small player in a city full of heavyweight traders, the brainchild of a telegenic technical wizard. The latter, Peter Swayne, had been in the running for Time magazine’s “Man of the Year,” and there were dozens of interviews showing his broad grin and tuft of beard. “It’s all in the algorithms,” he would say when asked why he was going into the stocks and shares business. “Chaotic systems like the FTSE are still predictable if you can devote enough computing power to them, yoked to an intelligent system capable of looking back over the last twenty years and extrapolating patterns.” And he would talk like this for as long as anyone let him, fifty per cent buzzword and fifty per cent love of his own genius—all wrapped up in that charming smile.

Except the object of Swayne’s desire did seem to be a reality and not just his fond imaginings, because SFI started making waves in the City. Financial analysts started looking very carefully at the figures coming out of Schoen Fayre. It seemed to be able to beat its competitors by vital microseconds in the rapid-fire virtual dogfight of the trading floor. But it also made occasional mad lunges into the writhing pool of publicly traded shares, snatching up a fistful of nothing-very-much that became pure gold within the day, within the hour. And SFI were outsiders too. Their people didn’t go to the same clubs or patronize the same dealers as the regular stock market crowd. Other stockbrokers found Swayne insufferable, basically because he was telling the world media that the entire business could just be run by computers, without the need for well-paid executives. Needless to say, there were accusations of insider trading, but investigations failed to find anyone who might qualify as an insider. Swayne, meanwhile, parroted his line about it all being in the algorithms.

After about a year of this, however, SFI had a very bad day. Every trade went wrong. Swayne fell out with his partners and the shareholders who held the balancing twenty per cent wanted to know what the hell was going on.

Then they were back on form, and everyone tried very hard to pretend that it was all part of the plan, some financial and technical wizardry. And that Swayne hadn’t lost a hundred million sterling of client money by betting on the FTSE equivalent of a three-legged horse.

Then it happened again.