Final Option

worked for him once.”
    “Once was enough.”
    “When was that?”
    “About ten years ago. I’d just finished the first year of my Ph.D. program, and I was a burnt-out wreck. All I wanted to do was sit on a beach somewhere. But Dad saw my being wrung out as a sign that I wasn’t really cut out to be a mathematician. He’s never understood what I do. To him the theoretical seems weak and irrelevant. Guys like me are just gutless wimps, sitting around spinning numbers in the air.
    “So anyway, Dad never saw an opening without going for it. He told me that a precondition of his paying for my next year’s tuition was that I go to work for him over the summer. But Dad was impossible to work for. I don’t know how the guys here did it. He was the most controlling man who ever lived. There was only his way. No initiative allowed. And his temper knew no limit. I don’t know what inner demons drove him—I know his childhood was less than idyllic—but I think he got a sick thrill out of having every one of his employees terrified of him. I’d had enough of his temper as a child. I had no desire to come back for a second helping as an adult. And it was so frustrating. My whole life I’d been hearing about how much he wanted me to come to work for him, and yet as soon as I arrived it became clear that he didn’t know any other way to treat me than he had as a child. Sure he was successful, but I saw so many ways he could be more so. Simple things, like streamlining the record keeping. But Dad hated computers. He tried to keep all his records in his head; he saw writing things down as a weakness.
    “He was also incredibly set in his ways. I was already turned on to chaos theory. I was excited about trying to apply it to futures trading, but Dad wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted to stick with what he knew—trading the agricultural commodities, running a boiler room where they made cold calls, and terrorizing the brokers. Do you know anything about chaos?”
    “Not the kind you’re talking about,” I replied.
    “It’s a relatively new area of theoretical mathematics concerned with modeling complex, real-world systems. It was initially developed in an attempt to understand and predict the weather, which has direct applications to price movements of agricultural commodities. But chaos theory also can be used to model any highly unstable, nonlinear system—like futures markets themselves. Face it, most of the guys down there trading in the pits aren’t very sophisticated. They trade a tick here, a tick there. They squeeze out a few bucks trading ahead of broker orders. But there are a couple of outfits that have been very successful in applying higher mathematics to futures trading. Just look at CRT. They’re a bunch of philosophers and physicists who’ve developed a sophisticated trading system. Over time they’ve been a hundred times more successful than Dad.”
    “But your father wasn’t interested.”
    “Dad didn’t want what he couldn’t control. He wanted me to come and work for him all right, but when it came right down to it, he wasn’t interested in what I had to offer. He wanted another cowering toady hke Tim. You know what they called Tim when I worked here? He had this nickname—‘Sniff.’”
    “Sniff?”
    “Because his nose was always up my father’s ass. I know that Tim’s my cousin and that Dad gave him a job because his father was Dad’s brother, but Tim does not have all of the family’s best qualities. He’s got Dad’s temper without Dad’s talent for trading. But, as my Dad never tired of pointing out, Tim was as loyal to him as a son.”
    “So what did your dad do when you quit?”
    “He was pissed. But my reaction was much stranger. I didn’t have a job. Dad said he wouldn’t pay my tuition for the upcoming year. I went to the university’s financial-aid office and explained my situation, and they just laughed at me. Poor penniless Barton Hexter. Then I found out the Merc was running a simulated trading contest with a twenty-thousand-dollar grand prize, and I decided to enter.”
    “You mean one of those competitions where everyone starts out with a certain number of imaginary dollars?”
    “And the person with the most money in his account at the end of thirty days wins. I finished with eight hundred ninety thousand dollars more than the second-place finisher. I got a check for twenty thousand and a first-place certificate. I used the money to pay for my