86
BEN MEZRICH
David laughed, then realized Mendelson was serious. Seventy million dollars. The number was staggering. He remembered what Reston had told him—that Mendelson had been one of the biggest traders around. Obviously, David had come to the right place for information about the trading floor. “Mr. Mendelson, I need a crash course in trading.” Mendelson smiled. “From what I hear, you’ve already got the basics down. Pick out the biggest guy on the floor, insult the fuck out of him, then get out of the way.” David grinned. “If that was all there was to it, I’d be down there decking meatheads all afternoon.” “Hah. No, that’s not all there is to it. Because those meatheads are actually pretty impressive, when you think about ’em. Not one of them is making less than five hundred thousand dollars a year. A few are bringing down millions, and an even smaller few are bringing down tens of millions.” David whistled. It was hard to imagine a guy like Vitzi making that kind of money. David knew the basics of trading—buy low, sell high, and the reverse—but when it came to oil in all its forms, he was a neophyte. How did you judge supply and demand? How did you factor in all the variables, from the weather to wars in the Middle East to drunk captains driving oil freighters into the Alaskan shoreline? “It’s like that scene in The Matrix where all the numbers are floating down the screen,” Mendelson said, leaning back in his chair and lifting his bare feet up onto his desk. “At first, it seems like noise, none of it makes sense. It takes time to adapt to what’s going on. And one day, suddenly, those numbers have meaning.” There’s a method to the madness, he continued to explain, as David furiously filled his notepad. The chaos downstairs was actually a choreographed market system: the traders in the brightly colored jackets reacting to the shifting prices of the different categories of oil derivatives, buying and selling based on the supply and demand of the outside world. The traders were speculators