And that’s why Astor loved the business. Hedge funds were a license to bet—and to bet big—without Big Brother looking over your shoulder telling you what to do and how to do it, and, worse, demanding an outsized share of your profits when you won. God bless the U.S.A.
Astor continued to the end of the desk. Though it was summer, most of the traders wore fleecies and sweatshirts. Astor kept the room chilled to a brisk sixty-two degrees. He liked his boys and girls alert. Many of their sweatshirts bore names of alma maters. There were more Stony Brooks than Whartons. Astor couldn’t care less where someone had gone to college. (After all, he hadn’t managed to get a degree anywhere.) He cared about smarts. He’d cherry-picked the twelve men and two women who worked for him from the best firms in the world. He had two Brits, a few Indians, a gal from Shanghai, an Israeli, even a few Americans. They ran the gamut in personalities from extroverted jerks to introverted jerks. Talented traders were not renowned for their people skills. Or, as Alex had often commented, “It takes one to know one.”
Astor’s office occupied a corner of the building adjacent to the trading desk. The door stood open and he was greeted by a view south across Battery Park to the Statue of Liberty, Staten Island, and New Jersey.
New York City. The center of the universe.
Astor set down his satchel and dropped into his chair. An electronically tinted glass wall allowed him to look onto the floor. This morning the wall was opaque. His first order of business was a check of the markets. He spun to face the panoply of monitors that took up half his desk. Futures showed that the market would open strongly on the downside, a bit more than a 3 percent drop. European markets were mixed. Asian markets had closed down a percent. The fall in the U.S. market was a knee-jerk response, and the market would bounce back in a day or two.
Viewing the numbers, Astor experienced an immediate and visceral thrill. With $5 billion in the game, he wasn’t merely an observer but an integral, albeit tiny, part of a bigger, immensely powerful and efficient machine. A vast, seething highway of ever-changing, ever-evolving information. Some people got off on scaling granite cliffs or jumping out of airplanes. Astor got his thrills in this chair. It was a game of intellect and daring, with chance in the guise of unforeseen events always dangling above your shoulder. A Damocles sword fashioned of gold and greed. Sit down. Buckle up. And plug in. He’d been doing it for fifteen years, and it never got old.
Astor skipped past the futures to the one symbol that concerned him most.
The position.
“Six-thirty,” he said, looking over his shoulder at Shank, who hovered nearby. “No worries.”
“I still want to look at the press conference.”
Astor punched a button and a slim screen emerged from a credenza situated against the wall. “Bloomberg, right?”
Shank said, “Yes.”
Astor opened his drawer and began digging through the contents. There were small orange prescription bottles of Lipitor, Xanax, Imodium, Ambien. He settled for a box of Altoids and popped three into his mouth. Another screen showed his morning schedule.
At nine there was a meeting with Septimus Reventlow, who managed the Reventlow family office. Family office was the term used to describe money passed down from generation to generation and managed on behalf of the heirs. Think Rockefellers, Rothschilds, or even Astor’s namesake. When he’d first started in the business, family offices invariably involved “old money,” money earned fifty to a hundred years before by a long-dead tycoon. These days it was the opposite. Family offices handled the billions earned by private equity mavens, software billionaires, and Internet entrepreneurs, all of whom were still very much alive.
At ten he had a meeting with Pacific Ventures, a private equity firm that managed about $10 billion. Pacific Ventures’ main game was buying up companies, restructuring them (trimming the deadwood and invigorating what was left), and selling them for a profit several years down the road. It also invested in hedge funds like Comstock. Astor punched in the account and saw that as of this morning Pacific Ventures had just over $100 million invested in his Astor fund. Pacific Ventures was a good client.
Comstock operated four funds. Comstock Alpha was a long/short fund. This was the classical hedge fund, which didn’t seek to demolish the market return but was satisfied to beat the major indexes—the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P—by a few percentage points.
The team that traded the Alpha fund lived life glued to their monitors. When the market got frothy on the upside or fell through the floor, they couldn’t afford to leave their desks for a moment, not even to use the john. People liked to joke that they kept a motorman’s caddy at the ready. As for the other thing, they’d fart it out. True on both counts. No one said a trading floor was a nice place to work.