Читать книгу The Money Makers - Harry Bingham - Страница 14

Thursday morning. The red lights of digital clocks display the times around the world’s financial centres. News messages roll incessantly across a dot matrix wall panel while the glow from banks of computer screens fights back the dark. Every now and then a phone rings briefly in the silence. But apart from a few early-morning cleaners there is no one here to check the screens or answer the phones. No one except Matthew. It is five fifteen am.

Matthew was attached to a group of four traders dealing in the smaller European currencies: the Swiss franc, the lira, the Dutch guilder, the Swedish krona, the peseta, a few others. Between them his four traders mustered six passports, thirteen languages, and a shared passion for dealing.

Matthew’s job was to support the group in any way it wanted. He was meant to forage for information, calculate spreadsheets, run errands, and get the coffees. So far the only job he’d done at all was getting the coffees. He couldn’t stand the trashy coffees from the vending machines, so four times a day he went to the Blue Mountain Coffee Company’s boutique to get the world’s most heavenly cappuccinos at £1.80 a cup. If it weren’t for this unaccustomed service, the traders would have had Matthew fired weeks before. As it was, they rated his survival chances at just about zero. As Luigi Cuneberti, the Swiss-Italian who traded Swiss francs and lire, put it: ‘Matteo, we give you a job when Italy has paid its national debt and the lira is worth more than the dollar.’

That needed to change.

All banks have the same information from Reuters, Bloomberg, Telerate. A million computer screens can be accessed with a few key strokes. Data is updated every second, news reported as it happens. It’s not information that makes the difference but judgement. And judgement requires the right facts in the right format at the right time.

Matthew set to work. He scrolled through the overnight news stories on Reuters, printed off the full list of headlines plus the handful of stories he thought important. Next, he called the bank’s main Far Eastern offices: Tokyo, Hong Kong, Singapore, Sydney. Some markets were quiet, others not. After every call, he made detailed notes.

Then, he went out on to the street to an international paper stand, where he bought eight European newspapers plus the European edition of the Wall Street Journal. He wasn’t fluent in any language other than English, but he had spent enough time skiing in Courcheval and Zermatt, enough time in the bars of Tuscany and the beaches of Mallorca, and enough time with girls in all these places to get the gist of what he read. He made clippings of the articles he thought important, and added them to his growing stack.

He looked at his watch. Six forty-five am. He had more to do, but was out of time. He collected up his work and ran it through the copier five times: once for each of his traders, once for himself.

As the pages copied, Matthew realised three things.

First, he had absorbed a surprising amount since being at the bank, despite his weeks of indolence. Second, there was an almost infinite amount of research he could do. Today’s effort was only a start. And third, he had eight weeks of his summer job remaining. At the end of those weeks, he had to convince Madison not just to hire him, but to hire him right away without waiting for him to complete his degree. That was unheard of. But if Madison turned him down and forced him to return to Cambridge in October, he’d have failed to meet his father’s goal before he’d even started.