By ninety four the city moved faster than ever it wasn’t just traffic or people it was the pulse of data the invisible current running under every street connecting screens and servers from New York to London to Hong Kong the sound of keys clicking replaced the noise of shouting traders and that quiet was somehow louder
Dalton’s fund had become a name whispered with awe we were the young bloods the cowboys of derivatives building structures no one fully understood not even us sometimes it didn’t matter the models said profit the computers confirmed it and that was enough we told ourselves the future belonged to the ones who moved faster than fear
I sat behind three screens twelve hours a day my eyes burning but my brain alive the markets across time zones overlapping so perfectly it felt like playing chess on five boards at once I stopped noticing the sun it rose and fell behind tinted glass while the numbers stayed awake
Dalton loved risk he said the problem with old traders is they remember pain too well forget pain kid and you’ll make history I should have been scared instead I wrote it down in my notebook like a lesson
We were betting on currencies now Thai baht Indonesian rupiah Malaysian ringgit money without borders without mercy we borrowed cheap in one country and lent dear in another building profit on thin air and confidence Julia called it beautiful madness once when I tried explaining it to her over dinner she said it sounds like a house built on wind I said all houses are she didn’t laugh
By mid ninety six we were gods again returns above thirty percent Dalton in magazines shaking hands with politicians I was his second his shadow people said we were rewriting finance I knew we were just stretching the same old greed across new wires
My father called once said he’d sold his cab bought that house in Florida told me the sunsets were beautiful said I should visit I told him maybe next quarter there was always a next quarter
Julia left the firm around then said she wanted to do something that didn’t involve derivatives or caffeine she asked me to come with her said I looked tired I said I couldn’t not now not when we were so close to something big she said you’ve been close for years and I didn’t answer because she was right
That summer Dalton called an emergency meeting said the Asian markets were showing tremors small cracks he called them opportunities we doubled down because that’s what gamblers do when they smell smoke they throw more chips on the fire
Every day the volatility grew bigger and so did the tension you could feel it like static under the skin traders talking faster coffee cups piling up eyes red from too many screens I lived inside the hum of it couldn’t sleep when I closed my eyes I saw currencies collapsing and recovering in endless motion
Then one morning I woke to the sound of my phone ringing before dawn Dalton shouting from the other end the Thai baht’s gone he said they pulled the peg we’re exposed I sat up the room spinning the world suddenly too real
The next forty eight hours blurred into chaos our positions unwinding faster than we could react the models useless the correlations broken the air thick with disbelief we watched profits vanish zeroes turning to dust Dalton slammed his fist into a screen it cracked didn’t change anything
I stayed calm outwardly maybe out of habit maybe because panic felt pointless by the time it was over we’d lost half our capital clients pulling out regulators circling the same story all over again different year different names
Dalton disappeared for a week came back pale said we’d recover we always do and somehow we did investors forgiving as long as there was still hope and a good story to sell
But something inside me shifted that month the game felt different not broken exactly but hollow I realized we weren’t masters of anything we were just riding waves pretending to steer
That night walking home through the warm August air I looked up at the lights of the city and felt the same old hunger but softer now like an echo of youth fading and I wondered how many times a man could rebuild himself before he stopped recognizing what was left