The Fix

Chapter 4 A Day in the Life

Hayes may have been predisposed to fixate on financial markets, but he was also a product of his environment. And to be a trader is to have an addiction. He wakes no later than dawn and immediately reaches for his smartphone to find out what's happened in the market while he was asleep. His journey into the office is spent absorbing data until his brain is saturated. By the time he gets to his desk, he has already taken in a mass of information filtered on the basis of its usefulness in predicting movements in short-term interest rates: economic reports, news articles, e-mails, prices. He scans them quickly and moves on to the next item. If he's lucky, a trading strategy crystallizes in his mind.

After nodding towards his colleagues, he pulls on his headset and begins calling his brokers. The next eight hours are spent in a state of heightened focus amid the frenzy. He never stops talking, listening, typing, reacting. In the rare moments he's not offering prices or closing deals, he's working on improving the accuracy of the spreadsheets he uses to help spot price anomalies and identify opportunities. It's utterly immersive. There are no meetings during the trading day and no lunch break. The only reprieve is a five-minute run to the toilet or the bank's in-house coffee bar. His pulse is elevated. His pupils dilate. The room erupts every time an unexpected announcement hits the newswires. The levels of cortisol, serotonin and testosterone in his ...