At pride of place in the center of my screen was a Planet Labs map of the world with sea levels indicated to the millimeter by real-time satellite laser altimetry. Higher sea levels than the average for the previous month were shaded red, lower areas blue, gray for no change. Every day the colors shifted, marking the water’s slopping around under the pull of the moon, the push of prevailing currents, the sweep of the winds, and so on. This perpetual rise and fall now got measured to an obsessive-compulsive degree, understandable given the traumas of the last century and the distinct possibility of future traumas. Sea level had for the most part stabilized after the Second Pulse, but there was still a lot of Antarctic ice teetering on the brink, so past performance was no guarantee of future anything.
So sea level got bet on, sure. Simple sea level itself served as the index, and you could say it got invested in or hedged against, you could say gone long or short on, but what it came down to was making a bet. Rise, hold steady, or fall. Simple stuff, but that was just the start. It joined all the other commodities and derivatives that got indexed and bet on, including housing prices, which were almost as simple as sea level. The Case-Shiller indexes, for instance, rated housing price changes, in blocks from the entire world to individual neighborhoods and everything in between, and people bet on all those too.
Combining a housing index with sea level was one way to view the drowned coastlines, and that was at the heart of what I did. My Intertidal Property Pricing Index was WaterPrice’s great contribution to the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, used by millions to orient investments that totaled in the trillions. A great advertisement for my employers, and the reason my stock in house was high.
That was all very well, but to keep things humming along, the IPPI had to work, which is to say be accurate enough that people using it well could make money. So along with the usual hunt for small spreads, and sorting through the puts and calls deciding if I wanted to buy anything on offer, and checking on exchange rates, I was also looking for ways to bolster the accuracy of the index. Sea level in the Philippines up two centimeters, huge, people panicking, but not noticing the typhoon developing a thousand kilometers to the south: take a moment to buy their fear, before tweaking the index to register the explanation. High-frequency geofinance, the greatest game!
At some moment in the dream time of that afternoon’s trading session, interrupted realworldistically only by the need to briefly pee and eat, my chatbox in the bottom left corner of my screen flickered, and I saw I had gotten a note from my trader friend Xi from Shanghai.
Hey Lord of Intertidal! Flash bite last night there, what happen?
Don’t know, I typed in. Where can I see it?
CME
Well, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange is the biggest derivatives exchange on the planet, so I was thinking this was not much of a clue as to where this flash bite had happened, but then I tapped around a bit and saw that everything on the CME had taken a quick but massive jolt the night before. For about a second around midnight, which seemed to suggest Shanghai as the source of the event, two points had been chopped out of every trade, which was enough to turn most of them from gains to losses. But then an equally instantaneous lift had come a second later. Like a mosquito bite, noticed only as an itch afterward.
WTF? I wrote to Xi.
Exactamundo! Earthquake? Gravitational wave? You Lord of Intertidal must elucidate me!
IWIICBIC, I wrote back. I Would If I Could But I Can’t. This was something traders said to each other all the time, either seriously or when making excuses. In this case I really would have if I could have, in terms of explicating this bite, but I couldn’t, and there were other pressing matters facing me as the day waned. The light on the actual Manhattan out my window had shifted from right to left, Europe was closed, Asia was about to open, adjustments had to be made, deals finalized. I was not one of those traders who cleared the books at the end of every day, but I did like closure on the biggest outstanding risks, if I could get it. So I focused on those situations and tried to finish up.
I came to an hour or so later. Time to get out onto the canals and putter through traffic while there was still sun on the water, get out on the Hudson and get a little zoom-on headed north, blow all the numbers and gossip out of my head. Another day another dollar. About sixty thousand of them on this day, as estimated by a little program bar in the upper right corner of my screen.
I had put in an option for my boat at 4, and was able to strike on it with a call down at 3:55, and by the time I got down to the boathouse it was in the water ready to go, the dockmaster smiling and nodding as I tipped him. “My Franklin Franklin!” he said as always. I hate to wait.
Out onto the crowded canal. The other boats in the financial district were mostly water taxis and private boats like mine, but there were also big old vaporetti grumbling from dock to dock, jammed with workers let out for the last hour of day. I had to look sharp and pop through openings, surf wakes, angle for gaps, cut corners. Vaporetti as they pass each other slow down, to courteously reduce the size of their wakes; private watercraft speed up. It can be a wet business at rush hour, but my bug has a clear bubble I can pull over the cockpit, and if it gets wild enough I use it. On this afternoon I took Malden to Church, then Warren to the Hudson.
Then out onto the big river. Late on an autumn day, the black water sheeting over a rising tide, a bar of sunlight mirrorflaking across the middle of it right to me. Across the river the superscrapers of Hoboken looked like a jagged southern extension of the Palisades, black under pink-bottomed clouds. On the Manhattan side the many dock bars were all jammed with people off work and starting to party. Pier 57 was popular now with a group I knew, so I hummed into the marina south of it, very expensive but convenient, tied off the bug and went up to join the fun. Cigars and whiskey and watching women in the river sunset; I was trying to learn all these things, having only known prairie sunsets in my youth.
I had just joined my group of acquaintances when a woman walked up to the old delta-hedging guru Pierre Wrembel, her black hair gleaming in the horizontal light like a raven’s wing. She kept her eyes on the famous investor, speaking beauty to power, which is perhaps more common than speaking truth to power, and definitely more effective. She had wide shoulders, muscular arms, nice tits. She looked great. I meandered to the bar to get a white wine like hers. It’s best to meander at times like this, circle the room, make sure your first impression was correct. So much can be determined if you know how to look—or so I assume, as in fact I don’t know how. But I tried. Was she friendly, self-conscious, wary, relaxed? Was she available to someone like me? Good to figure that out in advance if possible. Not that it would be wasting my time to chat in a bar with a good-looking woman, obviously, but I wanted to know as much as possible going in, because under the impact of a woman’s direct gaze I am likely to suffer a mind wipe. I am way better at day trading than at judging women’s intentions, but I know this and try to help myself if I can.