Opening

The room was empty and cold, something she preferred. She ran her hands against the surface of the walls; her smooth warm skin, against the roughly hewn surface of concrete. Today the air smelled recycled, and the windows needed to offer more light. They were large enough, but the climate would not cooperate, creating skies so dark and heavy, that at times they had a foreboding presence.

She lay on a small mattress; a simple bed, made of cotton and twine. She preferred simple things to ornate furnishings. Others had tried to convince her to spend money on things which provided the support of convention. But somehow she could not comply. Even her clothing needed to remain oddly out of sync in its simplicity and repetition.

As she let the morning wake her, she found her mind filled with diagrams. They were not those from games, mathematics or science. Sometimes she wished they were so light and playful. No, they were not distractions. To herself, she called them dragon triangles. She had refused to document them, and preferred to keep them in her mind, drawing them again each morning in an act of remembering.

She stood up and shook off the stillness of body. Now each muscle moved, and the fabric of her long worn shirt brushed against her. It was a dance to have a body. Having grown up around those much older, she had always been made aware that it was a long coordinated effort, organized, and directed with care. She tended to trade in the corner of the room. Trading was also its own body; another living coordinated effort—of many minds; both those abstracted into mathematics, the living algorithms, and those of flesh and blood. Although it was denied, it was easy to see it was dominated at times by emotion. And it was this Black Swan of emotion and faulty algorithms that brought the markets alive. They were not perfect, nor did she think they ever should be. Perfection brought stillness, and stillness was death.

When she was younger, her trading was less successful, as she didn’t understand the integration or depth of the markets. In part this was because she was educated outside the traditional path of a trader. She stumbled upon the markets 10 years ago; it was an accident. She had no intention of actively participating. But something drove her more deeply into knowing them.

In practice, trading is a singular activity, and its success depends heavily on one’s discipline, endurance, and clarity. In actuality, the singularity is an illusion, as it is only the point or knot of a great surface of intersecting intentions.  A single trader, who works alone, and is not part of the fold of the financial fraternity, is by this disjuncture a contrarian, because information does not flow to them with the same speed and depth as it does to those inside the circle. Eime understood this, and she accepted it. It was not a simple matter, and its unfolding had been the most difficult of all, as she had to find a location where she might intersect, yet not disturb the order.

She made herself coffee, and began to turn on the interface that would connect her to the markets. One by one, as each switch was toggled, the voices of the market found their place within her trading room. Her previous night’s research lay on her desk, scribbled in long-hand, crossed and cleared, and finally distilled into something useful.

The day’s stories were being disseminated on the major financial networks. The anchors were all attractive and charismatic. They seemed far removed from the workings of the market, and perhaps this is why they could do their job. They were highly articulate in the language of the markets, yet never seemed to be speaking about what actually was occurring. At first Eime thought this was just a lack of knowledge or a mistake, but she soon learned it was intentional, not by them, but by those who organized their efforts. They were only voice pieces, creating both distractions and directional signs for the less informed.  It was not a conspiracy, or something sinister. That would paint it with far too much drama. No, it was much more of a simple pragmatic organization, which served specific groups. Eime had learned to read their news as a coded script. It was not a simple reversal, where one meaning could be inverted and interpreted as the opposite. It was instead a complex map written, (or in this case spoken), in the vernacular of the markets, coated with energy, happiness, and at times fear.

Naming

Eime took time to consider the practice of naming each market and providing it with a symbol. This provided the participants in the market a concept to use, to build more complex strategies.

It reminded her of the Pythagorean observation, which connected a “thing” to a name. Phythagoras came to understand numbering systems by noting how a frequency was generated by pressing a finger upon the string of an instrument. This point of contact, was given a symbol, such as One. These written and spoken symbols, these names, allowed for more complex abstractions to be generated, which could then be used to change the order of the “things” (or groups of things), they represented. For instance, if a frequency on a string is named “C”, then notations can be created and music written, informed both by the feedback of the sound, and the concept that is now abstracted into symbols. This allows the participant to create a distance between themselves, and the physical experience of the frequency on the string. Or, in the case of the markets, algorithms and strategies could be developed, to shift the exchange value, of  money passing from one column to the next; from one shareholder to another; from one bank to another; from one account to another; from one account owner to another; from one country to another; from one family to another.

Although this seems like a small distinction to make, naming allows for larger explorations, as one can gain perspective on the actions in the physical world, and act with consideration, rather than only responding to the physical experience of sound or the current value of a share in the markets.  It is also not insignificant, that initially, there was no zero in numbering systems. Zero was considered to represent God. One, which Pythagoras observed from watching a frequency generated by the placement of a finger on a string, was everything that Zero was not.

In the 21st century, names were becoming increasingly corrupted. Where before, one’s “good name” provided street credibility; the duration of such credibility was becoming increasing shorter. Social media was changing this, as individuals became represented by online “handles” (names), which had little or nothing to do with a person’s given name. Databases were created and manipulated by bankers and businesses, to control rating systems on these online personas. Online Identities could be generated in a day, and promoted in an hour, to rise up as new kings, with a million followers. In the same breath, one’s identity could be re-framed, and dispersed to millions as something completely other than what it was, destroying given names and their Online Identity in a moment, if those in the new seats of power thought it useful or fun.