Stock-Surfing the Tsunami (new yorker)
(snippet here):
Milman’s monologue reads like an emotional ticker tape: “Fuck. Shit. Oh my God. Unbelievable. Oh God. Wow. Oh God. Wow, wow.”
And then, without warning, it happens: The market strikes an invisible bottom, the indexes reverse course, and stock charts head skyward. Perhaps it’s the glimmer of hope in the forthcoming meeting of the G20? Or plummeting oil prices? Milman doesn’t know why—or care. “Oh my God,” he says, whacking furiously on his keys, buying in as the market rises, then quickly selling off, over and over again, up, up, up. He leans off the edge of his seat now, like he’s trying to tilt the market to his will, a pinball wizard at the arcade. His monitor is streaked with green lines edging higher, his profit-and-loss gauge flipping numbers like a slot machine, punching up hundreds of dollars per second, point by S&P point—then thousands per second: green, green, green.
“Come on, NASDAQ, follow!” he hisses, urging it on. “C’mon, sixes, S&Ps! C’mon, let’s see fives, NASDAQ!”
The room is alive with chatter, row after row. The men lean into their screens, adrenaline surging. “Beautiful,” says a nearby trader.
“That is so fast,” whispers Milman. “Wow.”
full article at:
nymag.com |
