At One With the Market
For several years I watched this character in downtown San Francisco. He seemed so out of place in the midst of such modern goings on, and yet there was something timeless about him too. I wasn’t alone in appreciating him. The response to the piece was overwhelming. The editor of the San Francisco Chronicle Magazine said it was one of their most popular pieces.
AT ONE WITH THE MARKET: OFF THE DEEP END IN SEARCH OF THE ALL-CONSUMING GREENBACK
By Rodes Fishburne
There used to be an old man who stood in front of 44 Montgomery Street with a small spiral notebook and stared at the electronic stock ticker bolted onto the corner of the Schwab building. He would stand there, sometimes for two or three hours at a stretch, filling up his notebook with jagged handwriting as the stock quotes floated by.
He wore a gray suit and a fedora and looked like he could have walked right off the back-lot of RKO during the filming of “Citizen Kane.”
It wasn’t his demeanor or his clothing that first caught my eye. It was his posture. Rigid as a fence post, he was resolute and focused on the stock ticker. Yet the passengers in the stream of cars coming down the hill onto Market Street hardly paid attention to him. It was 1998 and they, too, were transfixed by the stock ticker and its numbers, which intimated by their own quickly disappearing nature that they were not long for this world.
I wish I’d taken a photo of that man, standing there in the wind and fog while the city moved past him like a tide that hasn’t time to rub up against an old piling. Better yet I wish I’d had Irving Penn or Walker Evans to capture him in black and white. He captured a feeling about a time.
One day, after I’d been studying him from a distance for a while, curiosity got the better of me and I said hello. He didn’t even blink, just took two neat steps down the sidewalk by way of reply.
I leaned against a column and watched him for 15 minutes. He just stood there, his faded fedora tilted back on his head, monomaniacally writing down the numbers as quickly as he could, barely pausing to flip pages. I’d just about lost interest when he suddenly stopped writing, tucked the notebook into his suit pocket, and went tearing off across the sidewalk and into the lobby of 44 Montgomery like a reporter on deadline.
As he passed through the lobby the concierge at the desk nodded in his direction, he was known here, before he disappeared around the far corner. I sped up and turned the corner too, only to find him standing there, staring at me balefully, a handful of quarters in his hand, a telephone already cradled to his ear. He quickly turned his back and began whispering into the phone.
This must be hot stuff, I thought. Remember, this was 1998 and the stock market had already lapped the field and was last seen rocketing past Jupiter. Everyone, from carpet salesmen to nail technicians, was making a ton of money. I once heard a young man shout across a cocktail party, “I’ll send you my sherpa’s e-mail.”
Maybe this man on the street knew something. Maybe he’d cracked the market’s code, and was calling it in to his broker. I leaned in for a closer listen, but the more I leaned the quieter he became, until I was close enough to annoy him into hanging up the phone. He flicked his face up at me and gave me a stare that only resides in the eyes of people who are permanently living in their own private worlds. It was a look that was not so rare in those days. Then he bolted back out onto the street, where he resumed his position, like a wary trout, among the flow.
Over the next several years I would always see him standing there, staring off across the street recording it all in his little notebook. Sometime during that period I stopped wondering about what he was doing and started thinking about what he was saying. He was a metaphor man; a flesh and blood symbol of our times. His reflected our compulsion back at us like a perfect, spotless mirror.
I was reminded of this the other day as I walked down Montgomery Street. The pace seems slightly less hurried than it used to. The hustle is still here,
but the bustle has been laid off. And something else is missing. Or more rightly put, someone.
Yet the story doesn’t end here. Several months ago I hired a taxi to go to the Oakland airport. The driver was a middle-aged man with a laptop next to him. He told me with great pride how he had taught the computer to read him the New York Times. He would scan the newspaper into his computer in the morning and convert it into a special format, and then, and this is where I started to appreciate his brilliance, he would use special reading software designed for blind people to read him the day’s news as he drove. I was impressed.
“How long have you been driving a cab?” I asked.
“Oh, off and on for six years,” he said. “My real love is day trading.”
It had been at least a couple of years since I’d heard anyone even mention day trading.
“I only drive a cab when I’m broke,” said Michael. “I went bankrupt last year,” he continued matter-of-factly. “But I’ve been saving, and I’ll be trading again real soon.”
“Why do you day trade?” I asked.
He grew extremely animated.
“It’s hard to explain. But see, there’s this moment, when you suddenly understand exactly what the market is going to do before it happens. It’s an incredible experience,” he said turning to look at me, “when you’re at one with the market. It’s better than sex.”
He misjudged the look on my face for envy.
“It just doesn’t last long enough,” he said wistfully. “But I’ve finally figured something out. A real breakthrough. See, I’ve been practicing Transcendental Meditation for years,” he said.
“And I’m now able to get myself into an alpha state on a regular basis,” he said as I nodded along. “Well, pretty regular, you see I have this little device that measures when you leave the beta state and enter the alpha state.”
The Oakland airport appeared in the distance.
“So what does that have to do with day trading?” I asked
“Well, once I get in the alpha state, I start day trading on my computer.”
Again he misjudged the look on my face.
“Not with real money, just for practice. Just to make sure the whole thing works.”
“Does it work?” I asked, only too aware of what the answer would be.
“You bet it does. I can become at one with the market all the time. That’s why I’m saving up my money. Then I can start trading again for real.”
I was spellbound. The man in front of me had just blended western capitalism with eastern meditation into one seamless philosophical smoothie that sounded so wild and amazing you couldn’t help but want to drink it all in one long chug.
The old man and the transcendental day trader; they are our symbols. And they are still here, floating in and out of view, saving it up and waiting for the next chance to become “at one with the market.” And they will not be disappointed.
Rodes Fishburne is a writer living in San Francisco.
Originally published Sunday, February 23, 2003
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