Peta - Trading Bases: A Story About Wall Street, Gambling, and Baseball

DUTTON

Published by Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

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Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

First printing, March 2013

Copyright 2013 by Joseph Peta

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

REGISTERED TRADEMARKMARCA REGISTRADA

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Peta, Joe.

Trading bases : a story about Wall Street, gambling, and baseball (not necessarily in that order) / Joe Peta.

p. cm.

Includes index.

ISBN: 978-1-101-60965-1

1. Baseball. 2. Gambling. 3. Wall Street (New York, N.Y.) I. Title.

GV867.3.Pdc23 2012043509

Designed by Alissa Amell

While the author has made every effort to provide accurate telephone numbers, Internet addresses, and other contact information at the time of publication, neither the publisher nor the author assumes any responsibility for errors, or for changes that occur after publication. Further, the publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

To Caitlin,
an 8 WAR wife, with a replacement-level husband

Its the middle of the afternoon on March 31, 2011, Major League Baseballs Opening Day, and I have bets riding on four baseball games being played simultaneously. Its a Thursday, so the stock market is open, but I have no idea what the S&P 500 is doing. What I do know is that the Cincinnati Reds just scored four runs in the bottom of the ninth inning, making my first bet of the season a winner. This sets off a flurry of incoming texts and e-mails and causes me to wheel about with joy.

Opening Day marks the culmination of a month of writing baseball-related essays for my friends, but contrary to the stereotype of the statistics-obsessed, stay-at-home, male baseball blogger, I am neither clad in my boxers nor sitting in my mothers basement. In fact, when the year began, I occupied a seat on a Wall Street trading desk, just as I had for the previous fourteen years. I had signed a lucrative contract in the past year to trade technology stocks for a multi-billion-dollar Japanese investment bank.

While not a basement-dwelling blogger, neither am I the consummate Wall Streettrading, carefree Manhattan bachelor. I have a wonderful family. Eight years prior, I married a beautiful California girl and moved to San Francisco, where we chased our two tutu-clad daughters around a house overlooking the Pacific Ocean and the Golden Gate Bridge. So why am I sitting in a wheelchair 2,500 miles away, alone in a New York City apartment, unemployed and risking not only my money but my friends as well?

* * *

Born in 1965, I grew up a sports-crazed child, like so many postBaby Boomer boys. I devoured every word of the Philadelphia Inquirer sports section, collected baseball cards, treated the arrival of a new issue of Sports Illustrated like a weekly holiday, and played hours and hours of APBA baseball and Strat-O-Matic basketball simulation games, all of which eventually led my brain to become stuffed with random facts and trivia.

In some of those stories from Sports Illustrated, Inside Sports, and Baseball Digest, a fact referred to in passing often came to mean as much or more to me than the articles overall theme. I know Im not alone. Gather a dozen or so forty-something guys

Heres another: Manny Sanguilln couldnt find his car keys.

Whenever I hear the name Roberto Clemente, the first thing I think is Manny Sanguilln couldnt find his car keys.the Pirates catcher, to join him. Reportedly, Manny instantly agreed. The plane, later determined to have been a death-trap-in-waiting due to poor maintenance and an excessive payload, crashed shortly after takeoff, killing all aboard. But Manny Sanguilln wasnt aboard. He couldnt find his car keys and missed the flight. Forty years later, thats the part of the story I remember. I was only seven years old when Roberto Clemente died, but the Manny Sanguilln angle has stuck with me forever.

Manny Sanguilln has spent the years since knowing that a random incident saved his life. But what about all of the times your life would have changed immeasurably and you dont know it? How many times do you take yourself out of harms way and never feel the relief that you averted disaster? Its what made the Gwyneth Paltrow movie Sliding Doors so fun to watch, and its the basis of the home-security industrys sales pitch. Youll never know if that ADT sign on your front lawn discourages burglars or not, but ADT sure tries to convince you it does.

* * *

On January 2, 2011, a quiet, overcast, and brisk Sunday morning in New York City, I couldnt have been more excited to begin the year. I had just spent Christmas in California with my wife and two daughters, who were finishing the school year before moving cross-country to join me. The previous summer, I had taken a job with Nomura Securities, a Japanese investment bank attempting to penetrate the U.S. broker-dealer market, helping to launch an equities-trading desk in New York. Not only had Nomura given me a one-year, seven-figure guarantee but I was also working for a close friend, a thirty-year-old whiz kid named Pascal. At the end of 2010, our trading desk had been up and running for three months, essentially an exhibition season. A new trading year began the next day, and I couldnt wait to get started. Our trajectory had been straight up since the launch, but now it was time to really focus on results, continue to take market share, and fulfill the mandate to make money that senior management had given us. My overdeveloped sense of competition had gripped me all Christmas break, and I had one goal for 2011: to be the most profitable trader on my desk, a mantle I wore at Lehman Brothers from 2001 to 2003, the last time I filled a similar role. Pascal, not only my boss but a fellow technology stock trader on the Nomura desk, knew this and wasnt about to cede