Turn of the Century (41 page)

Right beneath one of the ILXs is his turret, the big, gray computerized phone, a state-of-the-art diptych of telephony, with rows and rows of names—Morgan, Goldman, Lehman, Smith Barney, First Boston—displayed in white on little blue screens.

Ben thinks out loud, barking buy and sell orders to his staff and making phone calls that rarely last as long as a minute. Almost every day he’s a fountain of adrenaline, like a bureau chief on election night, or a squadron commander during a mission, or a teenage boy who takes his video-gaming way too seriously. Although it is only a slight overstatement to say that Ben Gould lives to trade, he knows he’s just about too old for this. He’s told himself that the years of sloughing off faithless investors is phase one of the exit strategy; that he will change professions with the century; that he will quit trading stocks when Cal Ripken quits playing baseball. Taped to the top of his Bloomberg terminal is a cheap black plastic sign George Mactier gave him for his thirtieth birthday, now cracked almost in half and held together with Krazy Glue and staples.
THE TEST OF A FIRST-RATE MIND
, it says,
IS THE ABILITY TO HOLD TWO OPPOSED IDEAS IN THE MIND AT THE SAME TIME, AND STILL RETAIN THE ABILITY TO FUNCTION
. It’s an F. Scott Fitzgerald line—which is why, George explained back in 1984, he had it printed with no attribution, so that Ben could display it without looking like a jerk.

Ben prepares to make his first trade of the day. It will be the first of eighty-seven trades over the next seven hours, in the course of which he will buy and sell stocks and options worth $28 million. This will be a typical day for Ben. Right now, he has decided, he wants to buy puts on General Electric. He sees it’s trading at
. He happens to believe GE stock will decline in value between now and the middle of May. Puts are a way to sell a stock short, to bet that its price will go down during a specific period of time, the next week, the next month, the next ten months. A put is like the insurance policy that gives a homeowner the right to rebuild his house for its full value, what it’s worth today, should it happen to collapse during the term of the policy—a put on 100 shares of stock gives an investor the right to sell those 100 shares at their full value, what they’re worth today, if the price of that stock happens to collapse during the term of the put.(“The
fantastic
part,” Ben loves saying when he explains this to civilians, “is that with puts, I don’t have to own the house—I get the payout when my
neighbor’s
house is destroyed!”)

Ben lifts his head a few inches, looks over the Bloomberg screen at his derivatives trader Billy Heffernan, and says, “Hit the wire, Billy. Get me a market in the GE May 105 puts.”

“The screen market is 1¼ a half.” They can buy GE puts for between $1.25 and $1.50 a share.

“What’s it good for?” Ben wants to know how many he can buy without pushing the price up.

“It’s 500 up market,” Heffernan tells him.

“Buy me 500 GE May 105s.
Puts
.” Every put is the tail wagging the dog of 100 shares of common stock. Ben is telling Heffernan to buy 500 puts, a bet on 50,000 shares of GE dropping below $105 a share by the third Friday in May. Derivatives, puts as well as calls, expire on the third Friday of the month.

“You got it,” says Heffernan. He punches the button for his options trader on the derivatives desk at First Boston, whose name is Dowd. Until the last decade, almost all the options brokers were Irish or Italian, $450,000-a-year Great Neck men with $42,000-a-year Middle Village fathers and brothers, which is one of the reasons Ben fired his Yale brother-in-law, Kip, in 1987 and hired Heffernan straight out of St. John’s. Only in the last decade have the options desks started gentrifying, with fewer street kids, more MBAs, and a very few women.

On his screen, Ben sees that the put-to-call ratio for Mose Media Holdings is high and rising, 324:120, meaning that a large majority of his peers and their Heffernans are voting against the stock. On one of the ILX monitors he sees that Mose Media is already down 1⅞ to 33⅞ this morning. Ben decides to buy.

“I want to get long Mose,” he turns and says to his other trader, Frank Melucci, who negotiates all of Ben’s orders for common stocks. “I want to get in something big. Get me a floor picture of Mose.”

Melucci punches the button on his turret next to the name of his favorite broker on Goldman Sachs’s trading desk to buy Mose Media Holdings stock for Bennett Gould Partners, maybe a million dollars’ worth. Melucci’s conversation with his Goldman broker will be tape-recorded, and so was Heffernan’s call to First Boston. Every brokerage house records every trading call these days.

The broker at Goldman calls his floor broker, who goes to the specialist booth—the Goldman employee who actually deals with the stock of Mose Media Holdings. And in less than a minute, back up the human chain the information bubbles, the floor picture that Ben wants.

Melucci describes the market to his boss. “There’s 10,000 Mose offered at 33¼. Another twenty-five at 33½. So, we can take 35,000 between here and a half. You want to take them?”

He can buy 35,000 Mose shares for about $1.2 million. “See what he can do for me. Have him go upstairs, see if they have some to go on their desk.”

Melucci covers the phone with his hand. “We’re looking.”

“Is he real, or is he trolling? I want somebody with merchandise.”

A minute later Melucci says, “Goldman can stop you at an eighth.” Meaning they’ll sell the stock at 33⅛.

“Yes. Stop me at an eighth on the 35,000.”

Ben hasn’t taken his eyes off his screens during his conversation with Melucci. As on the monitors on brokers’ and traders’ and investors’ desks all over Wall Street, all over America, all over the world, the pixels forming the names and prices of the stocks and bonds and options that have appreciated in value since the market opened at nine-thirty appear in green. The names of companies that have lost value during the last half hour are in red. Whenever a thousand shares of any stock are sold by anyone anywhere the name of the company flutters for a second on Ben’s screens.

“Why is
Dugger
up?” Ben says, looking at the green letters and digits, not so much asking as thinking out loud. Bennett Gould Partners is a very large holder of the stock of Dugger Broadcasting, which operates TV stations, cable systems, and movie theaters in the Pacific Northwest. “Sinclair and Chris-Craft are red. Viacom’s red. Why is Dugger so green?”

“The
market’s
up seventy,” says Cheryl Berger, his researcher and analyst, whom he employs in part to deliver the conventional wisdom on demand, which she reliably does. “The
screen
is green.”

Most of his friends and all of his employees play along with Ben’s experiment in extending the binary color-coding to personal correspondence: since 1998, the texts of Ben’s e-mail messages containing bad news have been red, and good-news e-mails are green. He got the idea from Sasha. She disapproves of his modification of her system—he sends and receives certain ambiguous news in regular black type. “But, Daddy,” she remonstrated, “
all
news is either good news or bad news. You just don’t always know it yet.”

“Hey! Pete! Hi!” Ben says into his phone to the chief financial officer of Dugger Broadcasting. “How’s it going, man? Happy spring.”

Ben hasn’t talked to Peter Sutherland about business for a week, because it has been against the law to do so. During the last twenty-four days of each financial quarter, the SEC doesn’t permit investors like Ben to talk much about company business with corporate officers like Pete. During the first sixty-six days of each financial quarter, however, the Bens are free to call the Petes to pry as much earnings information out of them as they can. Since the quarter still has weeks to go, the no-talk period is on, and Ben, who for the moment owns 351,000 shares of Dugger Broadcasting, is unable to speak plainly with his good pal Peter Sutherland (whom he has met face-to-face only once). But he can still call, just to say hi …

“I read about you in the
Journal
, Ben, you naughty fellow.”

“I’ve always said I’m too honest for my own good. Congratulations on your quarter, man.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You got to love those thirty-two-percent margins, Peter.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Are things still good?”

“Well, you know …”

“I know what? I know every quarter can’t hit it out of the park. That, I sure as shit know. But, so, are things feeling good?”

There’s a long pause. “I can’t say, Ben.”

“Hey, I know,” Ben replies, finishing with the encoded portion of the conversation. “I know you can’t. And I know you won’t tell me if Riley is still talking to Mose about swapping your station group for Mose’s shitty Canadian theaters.” He has double-clicked Sutherland’s name on the PC screen and opened a window containing the names of his wife and four children, and the children’s ages.

“By the way,” the CFO says, unable to resist Ben’s feint, “the offer from their side has always been assets
plus cash
. A lot of cash.” He pauses. “As you know, Ben, the board and Zane do not exactly see eye to eye on that particular strategic issue.”

“Hey! I say if the chairman and largest shareholder wants to become a Hollywood guy, he ought to be able to go for it. Dugger Broadcasting
is
Riley Dugger. In my opinion. So, Marcie is good? The kids?”

“Family’s super. Thanks.”

“Remind Andrew and, uh, Jason they’ve got Yankees skybox seats waiting for them if their workaholic old man ever brings them to town.”

“Andrew and Jasper. I sure will, Ben. You stay out of the papers.”

“I can’t guarantee you that,” Ben says, changing
JASON?
to
JASPER
, then clicking the Sutherland box closed. “I’ll talk to you soon, Pete.” Before the receiver is back in the cradle, Ben is shouting to Melucci, his common-stock trader. “Shit quarter for Dugger. Start unloading. Sell 150, 200 today. Not too fast. Work it. But I want it
all
off the sheets tomorow.”

“What happened?” Berger asks.

“One quarter of so-so growth, everybody explained away okay. But back-to-back quarters of so-so growth, and all these momentum longs who think Riley Dugger is some kind of bumpkin Midas are going to freak fucking out. Frank,” he says to Melucci, “you
got
to get out of the 200,000 Dugger today.”

“Ben?” Dianne says. “It’s George Mactier on three-seven.”

He takes the call because it’s George, but reluctantly, because the market’s just opened. “Hi. What is it? I’m a little jammed.”

“MBC told us a month ago they want to securitize their half ownership in
NARCS
. Is there any reason I should say no?”

“I’m not a lawyer. Call your guy, what’s his name, at Paul, Weiss.”

“Thanks a lot, Ben.”

“Hey! It’s nine fifty-seven, man!”

“I know, but we’re supposed to tell them yes or no right away, they’re about to do their stock offering, and I just wanted, you know … sometimes the lawyers don’t know the big picture.”

“Sometimes? Never. So Mose is ABS-ing individual
shows
, is he? Interesting. Let me call you back a little later, okay? I’m really jammed here.”

“Okay, but—Ben? You follow the company some, yes?”

“They’re way oversold.”

“Oversold meaning the price is still dropping?”

“George!
Yes!
I got to go, man.”

For five, ten seconds after he hangs up on George, Ben stares into
the middle distance. The two traders, sitting eight feet away, know that a period of silence this long means one of them is about to get an order. When Ben’s quiet extends to fifteen seconds, both men wonder what’s bothering him. Melucci looks over.

“Frank,” Ben says, “get me another 10,000 Mose.”

The
sun
!
Today’s
sun break (the local phrase) has lasted a couple of hours already, since before lunch. It’s chilly, it’s March, but because of the sun break, a dozen people are on the grass, five of them playing Frisbee and all but one wearing at least one garment made of polyester fleece. (Polartec is so ubiquitous for hundreds of miles around that it is now beyond stereotype, like black on Manhattanites and tans on Angelenos, like scales on fish.) The buildings are big but low, made of brownish brick, blandly symmetrical, neither friendly and picturesque nor cruelly lean, vaguely modern but lacking any modernist conviction. This is the newer, classier campus, but the place is as style-free as possible without being ugly (which would amount to a kind of style),
nice
in the prosperous hinterlandish way of people who spend no time thinking about haircuts or tradition or spectacle. On the cement stairs hugging the little fake waterfall—that is, the
water feature
—a young man with lank gray hair sits with a bare foot, using a spoon to clean the treads on the soles of one of his sneakers. He’s thinking about Fibonacci numbers and singing along with a Yes song (“I’ve seen all good people”), a song exactly as old as he is, playing through wireless speakers plugged in his ears. Two men climb the stairs past him, the younger one wearing a
St. Olaf College sweatshirt over shorts, with sandals and dark purple socks, and the other, over fifty, the oldest person in sight by more than a decade, wearing a tie. But the tie is a bow tie, self-conscious and eccentric, so it doesn’t quite count as a tie. (It’s like the way stylish men in L.A. and New York wearing three-button $3,100 Armani suits buttoned only at the top aren’t
really
wearing suits.)