1 Spartacus October 2, 2007 The market has its own intelligence. It has a sort of malignant omniscience that dictates that the market will do whatever fucks over the most people at any given moment in time. It knows your positions, and it knows your fears. You are a sinner in the hands of an angry God, and your positions are going to pay. Like Santa Claus, sort of, except that the market doesn''t care who''s been naughty or nice; more often than not, naughty wins. The market cares who is the most exposed, who is the most out over his skis, and who has taken the most risk at any given moment. And once the market has ascertained the point of maximum pain, it will move, violently, in that direction, causing the greatest number of people to lose the most money. It was moving that way for me today, having just been lifted on two million shares of IWM, an exchange-traded fund that tracks the fortunes of small capitalization stocks.
The perpetrator this time was Spartacus, a monstrous hedge fund that managed billions of dollars in assets, run by only a dozen men and boys. Their trading desk consisted of a few Staten Island kids who had walked bass-ackward into a pot of gold, and was led by a Snidely Whiplash character, an evil genius Russian named Yevgeny. Yevgeny was rumored to have earned $50 million last year by picking off slowpoke retard ETF traders like me, hoovering money out of my P&L and into his in a brutal daily transfer of wealth. Yevgeny didn''t give a damn that he was trading small cap stocks. He didn''t have an opinion as to whether small cap stocks would outperform large cap stocks on an economic basis. He was not making a strategic investment for the fund. For all he knew, he was trading May wheat. He cared about small cap only because it moved more than large cap; it was more volatile.
And with greater volatility comes more opportunities to fuck people over. His trade was causing about $170 million to be rammed into two thousand tiny stocks, increasing the price of each of them by about .2 percent, getting two thousand CEOs momentarily excited for their companies'' prospects as they watched their tickers turn green on Yahoo! Finance-that is, until Yevgeny decided to turn around and sell. This particular trade was already turning into a shit show, because when the fastidious, obsessive sales trader Andrew Duke quoted me, I thought I heard him ask for a price on one million shares. When the ticket arrived electronically on my screen, it read twice as much: B IWM 2,000,000 SPRTC M048392049832 I knew I was in big trouble. I had lost $140,000 before I''d even printed the trade, given that the ETF had rallied several cents, and being short two million shares, I was losing $20,000 a tick. This was going to be an exercise in stuffing ten pounds of shit into a five-pound bag. D.
C. and I looked at each other. We had been working together long enough to be able to communicate by visual semaphore. When I first met D.C., I didn''t like him. He was one of those perfect Ivy League mannequins, all J. Crew and hair helmet.
He was also a Garden City guy. Garden City amounts to a massive Wall Street cult on Long Island, where any able-bodied male born within the city limits has a birthright to a job at a major investment bank. My disdain, at the beginning, was barely concealed. But D.C. was no ordinary cake eater. He was, literally, perhaps the best lacrosse player in the country. At five nine (generously) and 150 pounds, you wouldn''t figure him to be the world''s greatest athlete.
He barely lifted weights and managed only the occasional run around Central Park. But he was, quite simply, the most coordinated human being on earth, and nearly ambidextrous at that. People who are gifted in one way are often gifted in others, and as a trader, D.C. was the silent assassin. Once I began working with him in 2004, I liked him instantly. In addition to his physical gifts, he was the most competitive person I knew. I would occasionally tire of the Hundred Years'' War with the sales force.
D.C. never backed down. He fought to make money on every single trade. And he was profoundly disappointed when he didn''t. Perhaps the most interesting thing about D.C. was that he was exceedingly uninteresting.
He had no deep, dark secrets, no skeletons in his closet, no illicit romances, no addictions, no nothing. It was impossible to believe that someone, especially in this business, could be that well adjusted. He was also a notoriously private person, so even if he was doing lines off a hooker''s fake tits at two in the morning in the W Hotel, I was never going to find out. In a way, his profound dullness made him just as much of a misfit as everyone else. We were a great team: I had the raw smarts and the passion for finance, and he had the trading dexterity and the persistence. Occasionally, however, someone would sneak one past the goalie, and we would have to clean up the mess. This time, it was Spartacus, and this time, it was a million-dollar mess. "Holy shit," says D.
C. I shrug. We''ll figure something out. The market has its own chemistry, its own pressure. Traders, after enough time, learn to trade a market by feel. A trading floor is a room full of dogs, cats, and squirrels that can sense an oncoming storm. All morning, stocks had been like a manhole cover rattling around on the pavement, hinting at some imminent terrific explosion. When Yevgeny bought, the manhole cover shot up into the air.
I bought a million shares as fast and as sloppy as I could. Satisfied with my handiwork, I sat and trembled slightly as I watched IWM trade 20 cents above where I''d offered it. I lost $70,000 on the first million that I covered, and I was out $200,000 on the second million, which I hadn''t even touched yet. This is important, because I''d have to buy even more IWM in order to trade out of the dangerous position, and that would only make the losses worse. If you have one hundred thousand shares to buy, you''ll have to buy it at progressively higher prices to fill your order. The purchases you make at 10:30 drive up the cost of purchases you make at 10:35. I was trying to restrain myself. The old me would have been pounding on the desk until I bruised the heels of my hand, and yelling, " Goddamn motherfuckers! " at the top of my lungs.
But no matter what Spartacus or any of my other customers did, I was determined to act professionally and to not lose my cool. I had embarrassed myself one too many times with a hurricane of a temper tantrum on the trading floor, which was always followed up by an emotional hangover on the way home. The market, along with its malignant intelligence and chemistry, now had the new me: the cooler-than-the-other-side-of-the-pillow me, the future senior vice president and general sizeola Lehman Brothers trader. I had two choices. I could hedge the trade now and lock in a sure $270,000 loss, which would destroy any profits we''d make for the rest of the day. Or I could wait to see what the market did and hope to buy back my IWM at a lower price later. The problem was, if I used a binomial tree to model each and every possible outcome, the likelihood of breaking even was less than one in twenty. The probability was actually worse than that, given that it was Spartacus.
The hedge fund was big enough and determined enough to push the market in their direction. When Spartacus bought, they didn''t buy just from one bank, they went around Wall Street and bought from everybody. I saw the prints going up. 09:52:02 IWM 1.0M 85.44 T Only forty-two seconds later, another IWM transaction with another bank, and then another, each one driving the price higher . 09:52:44 IWM 2.0M 85.
47 T 09:53:30 IWM 1.0M 85.55 T 09:54:11 IWM 2.0M 85.61 T This is what we called "getting steamrolled" or "shitting on our print." It meant that Spartacus had an order that was too large to give to a single counterparty, so they were splitting it up and spreading it around. It is good etiquette to give the entire order to one broker and let him work it over time to get the best price. It is bad etiquette to spray the street with your order flow like that-bad enough behavior to get you cut off from most places-but Spartacus denied it every time.
They lied about their trades, even when there was a gargantuan pile of evidence against them. They were bad guys. I turned to D.C., whom I always consulted in times of stress. "What do you think?" I asked him. He shook his head solemnly. This was out of his realm of experience, taking a $250K hickey before a trade was even half over.
"Okay," I said to the speechless D.C., "I think Spartacus is trying to bully this market higher, and I think it''s going to run out of gas. No way am I buying back these IWMs-not until they get back to scratch." When I am in a losing trade, my body undergoes a physiological reaction. I cannot leave my seat; I feel chained to it. I hunch over my desk, staring at the screen, watching the chart go higher, tick for tick. I don''t really sweat, but I do tremble with fear and rage.
I curse my life, and I hate myself in spite of the hundreds of thousands of dollars that I make. I am sick of being the doormat for all these arrogant hedge fund punks. I want to choke the living shit out of the sales trader that brought in the trade. I desperately need a drink. I feel the urge to verbally destroy the first person that talks to me. I start to think that torture is too good for some people. I hate everything and everybody, I see nothing but darkness, and the only thing that makes me feel better is even more hate; a higher, more cynical form of revulsion.