Limitless (11 page)

As Holland answered each of my questions, he gradually pulled himself away from the computer screens on the table. Then he started making himself an espresso, but by the time it was ready and he was drinking it, he seemed to have become sufficiently detached from his work to notice again that he was wearing nothing but boxer shorts, and to be self-conscious about it. He knocked back the remainder of the espresso, excused himself and wandered off down the hall into what I assumed was a bedroom.

In his absence, I went over to look at the computer screens again. It was amazing … he had made $500 – the price of one hit of MDT – in just fifteen seconds! I definitely wanted to learn how to do this, because if Bob Holland could execute thirty orders in a day, I was sure that I could manage a hundred, or more. When he came back, wearing jeans and a T-shirt, I asked him how I should go about learning. He told me that the best way to get into day-trading was to just do it –
trade
, and that most of the online brokers facilitated this by giving free access to simulated trading games and by conducting live tutorials.

‘Simulation games’, he said, in a tone that was becoming
increasingly
stilted, ‘are an excellent way of developing your skills, Eddie, and of gaining confidence in placing trades but without actually having to take any risks.’

I got him to recommend some online brokers and software trading
packages, and as I wrote this stuff down I kept firing questions at him. Holland answered everything I asked him, and
comprehensively
, but I could see that he was becoming slightly alarmed, as if the rate and nature of my questions was perhaps more than he’d bargained for – as if he felt that by answering them, by passing on this information, he might be unleashing some kind of Frankenstein monster into cyberspace, some desperate, hungry individual capable of who-knew-what financial atrocities.

It had taken a while, but Holland was completely focused on me now. In fact, he appeared more concerned with each new question and started introducing a cautionary note into his answers.

‘So look, start
small
, start by trading hundred-share lots for the first month or so, or at least until you find your feet …’

‘Hhm.’

‘… and don’t get too excited if you have a good day – one good day’s trading doesn’t mean you’re Warren Buffet. The next trade you make could just as easily blow your account out …’

‘Hhm.’

‘… and when you enter a trade, make sure you have an idea of how you expect it to behave, because if it acts counter to that – get out!’

My impulse was to go
Yeah, yeah, yeah
to all of this, and Holland could see that. But the reason he wasn’t getting through to me was because the more he warned me about the potential dangers of
day-trading
, the more excited I could feel myself becoming at the prospect of actually getting home and doing it.

As I was slipping my notebook into my jacket pocket, and then putting the jacket on to go, Holland upped the pace a little.

‘Trading can get pretty intense, you know.’ He paused, and then said all at a rush, ‘Don’t ever borrow money from family or friends, Eddie – I mean to trade, or to get yourself out of a trading crisis.’ I looked at him, slightly alarmed myself now. ‘And don’t start
lying
to hide your losses either.’

There was a hint of desperation in his voice. I got the impression that he wasn’t so much talking
to
me as
about
himself. I also got the impression that he didn’t want me to leave.

I
did, however, and badly – but I hesitated. I stood in the middle of the room and listened as he told me how he’d left his job as a marketing director to start day-trading and how within six months his wife had left
him
. He told me that he got restless and irritable whenever he couldn’t trade – like on Sundays, for example, or in the middle of the night – and that trading had effectively become his entire life. He went on to say that he was incapable of
accumulating
cash in his account and often didn’t even bother to open his brokerage statements.

‘Because you don’t want to face up to the extent of your losses?’ I said.

He nodded.

Then he went deeper into confessional mode and started talking about his addictive personality and how if it hadn’t been one thing in his life it had been another …

During all of this, the only thing I could think of was how sublime, how like a brief but intricate jazz solo that little fifteen-second passage of electronic commerce had been. Pretty soon, I couldn’t even make out what Holland was saying any more, not clearly, because I was gone, lost in a sudden, intoxicating reverie of
possibilities
. Holland, I realized, had been stumbling around in the dark, shaving off the occasional sixteenth of a point here or there, quite obviously getting it wrong more often than he was getting it right. But this wasn’t going to be the case with me.
I
would know what to do instinctively.
I
would know what stocks to buy, and when to buy them, and why.

I
would be good at this.

When I eventually got away and returned to Tenth Street, my head was still reeling. But then, when I opened the door of the
apartment
and stepped into the living-room, I immediately felt oppressed, felt outsized – like Alice, like I’d soon be curling an arm round my head and sticking an elbow out of the window, just to
fit
in the place. I began to feel somewhat aggrieved, too, as though impatient that I hadn’t already made lots of money from day-trading – aggrieved and in desperate visceral
need
of things … another new suit, a couple
of new suits, and shoes, several pairs of them, as well as new shirts and ties, and maybe other new stuff, a better hi-fi system, a DVD player, a laptop, proper air-conditioning, and just more rooms, more corridor space, higher ceilings. I had the nagging sense that unless I was moving forward, moving up, unless I was transmuting,
transmogrifying
, morphing into something else, I was probably going to, I don’t know,
explode
…

I put on the scherzo from Bruckner’s Ninth and marched around the apartment, like a one-man panzer division, muttering to myself, weighing up the options. How was I to move forward? How was I to get started? But I soon realized that I didn’t have too many options, because the money in the closet had dwindled to a few thousand dollars, which was about as much as there was in my bank account – and since, let’s face it, a few thousand dollars plus a few thousand dollars is still, for all intents and purposes, a few thousand dollars, all I had in the world, then, apart from a credit card, was a few
thousand
dollars.

Taking what was left in the closet in any case, I went out
shopping
again. This time I headed for Forty-seventh Street and bought two fourteen-inch TV sets, a laptop computer and three software packages – two for investment-analysis and one for online trading. Disregarding Bob Holland’s idea that too much information led to conflicting signals, I bought the
Wall Street Journal
, the
Financial Times
, the
New York Times
, the
Los Angeles Times
, the
Washington Post
and the latest issues of
The Economist, Barrons, Newsweek, The Nation, Harper’s, Atlantic Monthly, Fortune, Forbes, Wired, Variety
and about ten other weekly and monthly titles. I also got a handful of foreign-language newspapers, ones I’d at least be able to take some kind of a stab at –
Il Sole 24 Ore
and
Corriera della Sera
,
obviously
– but also
Le Figaro, El Pais
and
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
.

Back in my apartment, I phoned a friend who was an electrical engineer and had him instruct me over the phone about how to splice the wires from the two new TV sets into my existing cable connection. He was very uncomfortable about it and wanted to come round and do it himself, but I insisted that he just
explain
it to me,
goddammit – explain it to me over the phone and let me take notes. It was an entirely different matter, OK, from what I might have ventured to do under normal circumstances – change a plug, say, or replace a fuse – but I nevertheless managed to carry out his
instructions
, rapidly, and to the letter, and as a result I soon had the three TV sets operating side-by-side in the living-room. After that, I hooked up the new laptop to the computer on my desk, installed the
software
and went online. I did some research into Internet
stockbrokers
, and used my credit card and a bank transfer to open an account with one of the smaller companies. I then took the newspapers and magazines I’d bought and carefully spread them out around the apartment. I put reading material, open at relevant pages, on to every available surface – desk, table, chairs, shelves, couch, floor.

The next few hours flitted by in what felt like a couple of seconds. I spent them hovering anxiously in front of the five screens, absorbing information – and at a rate that made my previous efforts seem
positively
glacial. The three TV sets were beaming out different news and financial-service transmissions – CNN, CNNfn and CNBC – different tributaries into the one great global flood of information, analysis and opinion. The online broker I’d registered with – The Klondike Index – provided real-time quotes, expert commentary, news updates and hyperlinks to a variety of research tools and
simulation
games. On the other computer screen, I visited sites like Bloomberg, The Street.com., Quote.com, Raging Bull and The Motley Fool. I also occasionally took time out to dive-bomb over the acres of newsprint I’d accumulated, and read articles about anything and everything … Mexico, naturally, but also about genetically
modified
foods, peace talks in the Middle East, Britpop, the downturn in the steel industry, Nigerian crime statistics, e-commerce, Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman, Basque separatists, the international banana trade …

Whatever.

Of course, I had no real idea of what I was doing here, there was no coherent strategy, it was all random, but I’d gravitated to this notion that the more data there was stored in my brain – and wide-ranging
data – the more confident I would be when the time actually came to take some of those fabled split-second decisions.

And – come to that – what was I waiting for? I didn’t have much latitude, financially, but if I’d really wanted to, I could have been trading online within a matter of seconds. To place an order, all I had to do was select a stock, enter data about the type of
transaction
and number of shares required, and then click the Send Order button on the screen.

I resolved to begin the following morning.

Turning around in my swivel-chair at 10 a.m., I paused to survey the apartment. It seemed to have mutated severely in the previous twenty-four hours. Less recognizable than before, less identifiable as a living space, it was now, to use Bob Holland’s word, like the lair of some deranged obsessive. Too far into this to be getting squeamish, however, I swivelled back around to the two computer screens on the desk and set about looking for some suitable stocks to buy. I waded through endless pick lists, insider lists, Street-beater lists, but eventually went with my gut instinct and fixed on a medium-sized software company in Palo Alto called Digicon that I figured to be well placed for some short-term action. It had just gone through a lengthy period of trading within a very narrow price range, but seemed now to be on the point of breaking out of that. In fact, in the space of time it took me to consider Digicon, and to run some relevant data through the analysis programmes, the company’s share price went up by half a point. The account I’d opened with Klondike had steep brokerage fees and charged high interest rates, but they did allow up to 50 per cent leverage on opening deposits. So I sent off an order to buy 200 shares in Digicon, at $14 per share. Over the next half an hour I bought a total of 500 shares in six other companies, using up all my available funds, and then spent the rest of the day tracking these companies, looking for likely sell signals.

During the course of the late morning and early afternoon, all but one of the seven stocks I’d chosen went up in price, and by widely varying degrees. I made quick decisions about which ones to offload. Digicon, for instance, went to 17
, but I didn’t think it was
going to go any higher, so I sold it and cleared a profit of more than $600 – less the commission and transaction fee, of course. Another stock rose from 18½ points to 24¾, and another from 31 to 36
. By offloading each of these stocks at the right time, I managed to increase my basic fund from about $7,000 to nearly $12,000, and in the last two hours of trading I sold off everything except US-Cova. This was the one stock that hadn’t moved all day, despite signals that an uptrend was imminent. I felt irritated by this, because when I’d been choosing these stocks something almost physical had happened to me … a vague, tingling sensation in the pit of my stomach – or so it had seemed at the time. In any case, all of the other stocks had shifted, and I didn’t understand why this one wasn’t complying.