No Exit Press - The Armageddon Trade by Clem Chambers

The Armageddon Trade - Chapter One

“Enough, enough already,” he muttered, clicking the button marked ‘flat’. The numbers on his pulsating screen flashed a variety of colours and there was a series of pling noises. He stood up and looked around, rubbing his eyes. Eight fifty. He had traded for five more minutes than usual.

“You off, Gordon?” asked Nipper, the trader who sat to his right.

He popped an antacid into his mouth and nodded.

“You’re weird.”

“I know,” Gordon replied, not bothering to look at the other man. He was weird, that was certain, weird on a number of metrics.

All the textbooks said that the job he did couldn’t be done. The golden rule of markets stated you can’t call the direction of prices, and to sit all day at a screen to try and trade a profit was a waste of time. While there are ways to make money in the markets, as emphatically proven by the banks' crystal towers in London’s Docklands, none could be put down to predicting them. A financial institution like the one he worked for had many trading edges due to arcane tricks and technicalities, but none that could help predict the future.

So he sat there each weekday proving the theory wrong.

He justified his success by believing he was the typing monkey of legend, fated by sheer numbers to write Shakespeare accidentally. Everybody knew the story that if an infinite number of monkeys were sat down with an infinite number of typewriters and time on their paws one would ultimately write the Bard’s complete works. Well, he was that one monkey and for now the pages were rolling out on cue.

Every time he sat down at his machine he typed another financial sonnet.

With seven billion people on the planet, someone had to be the seven billion to one trader and he just happened to be that man.

He liked the monkey story, because when he had started at the bank that had been approximately his job: clueless ape. He had left school at sixteen and been taken on as a runner. Thanks to a local community programme for teenagers leaving school early, he had landed inside the portcullis of a financial behemoth. He was just part of the bank's local PR budget, but he didn’t care: by pure luck he had entered another world, one of black glass and white marble.

No one was called tea-boy any more, he was an ‘associate’, but tea-boy was exactly what he was, fetching and carrying all day. He didn’t mind. For starters the money was unbelievably good, triple what his friends were earning in the grey world outside. The bank was clearly a seat of power and to be the tiniest part of it filled him with a kind of reverent awe.

He would happily have done any job there while he waited for the day when someone on a floor above would decide to let him go. Out of the blue, though, he was transferred to one of the many dealing floors after an intern, very much a blue-blood marked for higher things, had come a cropper on the ski slopes and left a dry wadi where there had been a river of coffee, tea and caffeinated soda.

The overstressed dealers didn’t want to look up from their screens, just needed their drinks ever present. As far as he was concerned, that was no problem. The traders were the soccer stars of the bank, stressed, brilliant guys who won and lost fortunes. They were paid like international strikers until the day they were fired or were rich enough to tell their bosses where to stick their jobs. Where before they’d had to wave and shout, “Oi,” across the floor in the intern's general direction, he had constantly circled and made sure their favourite drink was there and at the right temperature.

Now he pulled out the sports bag from under his desk and headed to the lifts. The antacid tasted peppermint and fresh in his mouth as the cooling sensation hit his stomach. He liked his routine. It was the key to his success.

He went down to the gym, got changed and jumped on the running machine. Today was going to be a little different. At ten thirty he was up for a review with the boss. It was bonus season and that was an exciting prospect. He’d been doing great and expected a repeat of last year’s good fortune.

He had grown to love the office gym. It was a temple of employee welfare, a high church of fitness. With thousands of people in the building, it had features and equipment beyond the dreams of the average health-club member. Ironically, outside lunch hours it was practically empty and it was clear from the generally corpulent state of most of the bankers that few had a taste for physical exertion. He jumped on the running machine and set the pace to fifteen kilometres per hour. The trainers in the gym didn’t like him running so fast, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. These days, where he was concerned, all people ever did was suggest and smile politely.

“Why don’t you take it a bit easier, vary your routine?” the chief trainer had asked him one morning, halfway through his programme.

“Got to get high,” he’d said. “If I don’t get high I can’t trade.”

The instructor simpered. “There are other ways to get your serotonin up.”

He’d stared at the guy. All he wanted to hear was his feet thudding on the rubber. “Sure, write me a programme.”

“Absolutely.”

It hadn’t worked. Nothing burnt off the stress or cleared his head like running flat out for an hour. If he didn’t run, he felt dirty, like a seabird caked with oil.

It took ten minutes on the treadmill for the brain chemicals to kick in. First, at some indeterminate point, his body burst into sweaty life and from being dry and stiff he was suddenly loose and wet. Then the images, disjointed and dreamlike, would start to run in his head. The pounding of his feet and the whirring of the machine mixed with the music blaring in his ears, a little narcotic to discharge another set of neurons.

He didn’t understand how the other traders could sit there all day watching a handful of pixels crawl across the screen. They thought it was strange that he could just get up and leave the action, no matter how hot it was, and vanish for hours at a time. They understood why the bosses let him. He was making so much money he was free to do as he pleased. They thought it was perverse that someone who could pull in such a lot in so short a time shouldn’t pile it on every trading second of the day.

He hadn’t always traded like that. To begin with he had sat in front of his screens and traded every blip. Though he loved the game, it twisted him into an emotional wad, like the notepaper he scrawled on and binned. He’d made money when the market opened and after lunch, but after about an hour he’d hit losing streaks. He’d just about kept up with the rest of the traders but he was getting more and more wrung out each day. He became irritable,, started to see everything and everyone as an impending problem or a potential enemy. He’d found himself talking about his life in trading jargon: he would ‘hit the offer’ on some fish and chips, he would be ‘short’ of Arsenal for the cup. Weekends found him staring at walls, thinking about the markets, and at night he dreamt about them.

His trading buddies had the answer. Booze. They were keen to educate their junior brother in the art of getting utterly drunk after work -- it was a tradition for traders to be fuelled by alcohol -- and beer was a pretty good medicine . . . but by nature he wasn’t a drinker.

Then one morning he’d realized something. He was going to get fired. As he walked through the vast revolving door into the main atrium of the bank, the thought had struck him as if someone had spoken it into his ear. “I’m going to get fired,” he said. He looked at the expanse of polished marble, the huge abstract art on the wall above the dozen receptionists, the smart, handsome people filing through the turnstiles. “I’m going to get fired because every normal person here does.”

For a trader, normal is not the same as it is to the man in the street: normal doesn’t mean everyday. Normal is a description of what happens if you take a series of events and tally them up, then examine how many happen. If you track dice rolls, for example, the result of, say, a thousand is normal. The thousand rolls will make a thousand scores, and if you tally each score and plot it, you end up with a ‘bell curve’, which shows the probability of the way things tend to turn out. It’s a chart of the gravity of chance, a bell- shaped image that affects everybody’s life more than almost anything else.

This normal distribution was the foundation of the bank’s method of doing business, and when it came to people, they simply threw out the part of the bell curve that represented low-scoring dice. This meant plenty of fresh recruits in and lots of old hires out.

So, to be normal or in any way average meant that one day, and probably soon, you would be fired. You didn’t need to be worse than anyone else, just on the wrong side of the cut when the bell curve was in for trimming.

He had been trading for nine months but suddenly, as he observed the dark-suited security officers watching the staff come and go, he imagined himself being escorted out of the building.

After all, what was he doing there in the first place?

Now he looked at the timer. He’d been running for thirty minutes, and that made him smile; when time jumped forward he felt as if he was fast-forwarding the whole world around himself.

Gordon wasn’t his real name. They had given it to him -- but not before they’d called him Ken. Everyone seemed to get renamed on the floor and his original name had been Ken because that had been the name of the previous tea-boy – or, rather, the one he’d been awarded.

“Thanks, Ken,” said the head trader on the first day, not looking up from his screen.

“Ken?” he’d asked hesitantly.

“Yeah, Ken – short for Kenco.”

The silence made the trader look up to see the damage on the runner’s face, but Ken was smiling. The trader liked that. He pointed at a screen. “So, Ken, what’s the Bund gonna do?”

Ken squinted at the screen. He knew nothing about any of it, but the graph appeared to be rising. “It’s going up, way up.”

The trader clicked his mouse. “Right, we're ten million short.” That meant he was betting the market would go down. He gauged the runner’s expression for the sort of emotion that might give him a kick: shock would be enjoyable but indignation would give him a reason to goad the kid, but the new boy wasn’t having it.

“Can I get you anything else?” Ken said, as if he didn’t get, or didn’t care to get, the put-down.

“Apple.”

“Yes, sir.” He turned.

“Oi.”

Ken turned back.

“It’s Frank,” said the trader. “‘Yes, Frank.’ ”

“Yes, Frank.”