Prologue
Awareness of information as it happens, in real time, can give you an enormous competitive advantage—if you know how to use it. This was a key lesson I learned working on Wall Street in the go-go 1980s.
It's 1985, and I'm on the institutional trading floor of an investment bank in lower Manhattan. It's nearly noon, time for lunch, and nothing has happened all morning. But none of the bond traders leaves. They're scared they might miss something. The bank doesn't want them leaving either, so everyone gets pizza delivered to their desks.
Inhabiting a world of split-second decisions, bond traders earn big money making trades involving hundreds of millions of dollars. It's a daily battle that involves incredibly long periods of tedium punctuated by occasional short bursts of intense action.
Fortunes are made in seconds; reputations lost in a minute.
Nothing is happening now, though. All is quiet, and boredom reigns because no significant news has broken all morning.
Some traders desperately search their real-time news feeds from Dow Jones, Reuters, and the Associated Press for an angle, any angle, in the quiet market. What's Ronald Reagan up to today? What about Margaret Thatcher? Any news from Paul Volcker, the Federal Reserve chairman? Any economic data due to be released this afternoon? Any large companies announcing quarterly earnings today?
As they pore through data and news, the traders are poised, ready to commit huge sums of money when the moment is right. They peer intently ...
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