Wired on Wall Street

CHAPTER SEVENEPIC SUMMER

In May 2002, eight months after the terrorist attack, I was sitting at my desk in my Greenwich Street apartment when my cell phone rang. It was Craig Blaine. Without any preamble, he said, “I'm closing the fund down.”

The call wasn't totally unexpected. Blaine Asset Management had been limping along for a while. Craig was under heavy pressure, managing outside capital as well as his wife's family's money during a brutal stretch for a perma‐bull in a post‐9/11 market. He'd grown distant, sometimes disappearing from the office for days, retreating to his place in Lake Muskoka—maybe to clear his head, maybe just to hide.

When he finally returned in the fall of 2001, he acted like it was still 1999, barking trading orders as if the markets hadn't changed at all. But they had changed—dramatically. The heady bull of the '90s had grown into a full‐blown bear.

He gave me three months' severance, which, all things considered, was a generous parting gift—about forty‐three or forty‐four grand. He also said he'd vouch for my track record. The sleeve I'd managed had been market‐neutral, betting both long and short, and I'd made money—no small feat in those years. I'd only traded for about a year and a half, but that was better than losing money for the same stretch, which is what happened to plenty of traders.

And thanks to those gains, I'd finally paid off my ROTC loan—a massive anchor I'd been dragging ever since walking away from the scholarship. Clearing that ...