It’s rare that someone should develop an obsession with Wall Street without sharing its driving passion, the accumulation of money. It would probably take years of psychoanalysis to untangle that contradiction, not to mention others too sensitive to name here.
No doubt that contradictory obsession has early roots, but its most potent adult influence was probably my first job out of college, at a small brokerage firm in downtown Manhattan. The firm had been started by a former Bell Labs physicist, who wanted to use his quantitative skills to analyze and trade a then-new instrument known as listed options. The refugee physicist was considerably ahead of his time; few people understood options in 1975, and fewer still were interested in using the kinds of high-tech trading strategies that would later sweep Wall Street.