看看大MM是怎么玩的. (中译本不准, 请谅)

The Blow-Up Artist
Can Victor Niederhoffer survive another market crisis?
《破产的艺术家——维克多·尼德霍夫能再一次在市场危机中生存吗？》
by John Cassidy
作者：约翰·卡西迪
October 15, 2007
2007年10月15日
翻译：张轶 2009年01月31日
翻译目的：尼德霍夫是索罗斯的合作伙伴，出版了2本书《投机者养成教育》和《投机实战》。长阳论坛有人建议我翻译。
Niederhoffer’s approach is eclectic. His funds, a friend says, appeal “to people like him: self-made people who have a maverick streak.”
尼德霍夫的方法是折中的。一个朋友评论他的基金：“容易吸引他这样的人：自己自足的异端派。”
Keywords
Niederhoffer, Victor; Hedge Funds; Stock Market; Investors, Investing; Manchester Trading; Squash; “Practical Speculation”
关键词
维克多·尼德霍夫，对冲基金，股市，投资者，投资，曼彻斯特交易公司，打压，《投机实战》。
On a wall opposite Victor Niederhoffer’s desk is a large painting of the Essex, a Nantucket whaling ship that sank in the South Pacific in 1820, after being attacked by a giant sperm whale, and that later served as the inspiration for “Moby-Dick.” The Essex’s captain, George Pollard, Jr., survived, and persuaded his financial backers to give him another ship, but he sailed it for little more than a year before it foundered on a coral reef. Pollard was ruined, and he ended his days as a night watchman. The painting, which Niederhoffer, a sixty-three-year-old hedge-fund manager, acquired after losing all his clients’ money—and a good deal of his own—in the Thai stock market crash of 1997, serves as an admonition against the incaution to which he, a notorious risktaker, is prone, and as a reminder of the precariousness of his success.
尼德霍夫办公桌对面的墙上有一副大油画，名字叫艾塞克斯号，这艘船1820年在南太平洋被一条巨大的抹象鲸攻击后沉没了，这个事件为小说《白鲸》提供了创作灵感。艾塞克斯号的船长乔治·波拉德生存下来了，他成功地劝说他的投资方又帮他买了一艘船，一年后又装到了珊瑚礁。波拉德的事业毁了，后来他只好去做看门的人。63岁的对冲基金经理尼德霍夫在1987年泰国股市蹦盘中把客户的钱亏光了——自己的钱也亏了很多，他就得到了这幅画，作为对自己冒险行为的警戒。
Niederhoffer has been a professional investor for nearly three decades, during which he has made and lost several fortunes—typically by relying on methods that other traders consider reckless or unorthodox or both. In the nineteen-seventies, he wrote one of the first software programs to identify profitable trades. In the early eighties, he went into business with George Soros, then arguably the world’s most successful investor. A few years later, when prominent money managers were based almost exclusively in Manhattan, Niederhoffer moved his home and his trading room to Connecticut, to a twenty-thousand-square-foot neo-Tudor mansion crammed with books, manuscripts, silver jewelry, art work, and a collection of seashells. The walls of his vast living room, which has a ceiling about thirty feet high, are covered with more than two dozen paintings, many depicting industrial landscapes or Western shoot-’em-ups, and the floor is occupied by, among other objects, a large painted pony, a black-spotted wooden hound carrying three quail on its back, a seated pig, and two miniature black bears. Niederhoffer’s home is also frequently occupied by various of his children. (He has six daughters and an infant son, from two marriages and an extramarital relationship.)
尼德霍夫总是采用其他交易认为是鲁莽的，不正常的方法，在他接近30年的事业生涯中，他几次大起大落。他在70年代编了一个软件，以找到确认赚钱的交易。他在80年代初和乔治·索罗斯合作，然后又和全世界最成功的交易者合作。几年后，当著名的基金经理都把基地设立在曼哈顿时，他把家和交易室搬到了康涅狄格州2000平方英尺的新都铎风格的大房子，里面布满了书，手稿，银饰，艺术品还海贝。客厅很大，屋顶有35英尺高，墙上有20多幅油画，很多是关于工业风景或西部枪战，地板上有很多东西，还有多种油画，小马，背上驮着3只鹌鹑的黑点猎狗，坐着的猪，2只迷你黑熊。很多小孩经常去参观尼德霍夫的家。（他有6个女儿，一个很小的儿子，这些孩子来自他的2次婚姻和1次婚外情。）
After the 1997 Asian financial crisis, Niederhoffer was forced out of business for several years. Then, in his late fifties, he made a dramatic recovery. He founded three new hedge funds and launched a Web site, DailySpeculations.com, where he posts his idiosyncratic insights into the stock market—“What can we learn from shelled species about the markets?” he wrote in May—as well as opinions about sports, politics, and culture (“ ‘The Fantasticks,’ currently running as a revival on Broadway, is the perfect musical”). He has mentored dozens of successful traders, many of whom regard him as a guru. “Before I joined Victor, I used to trade for a Wall Street firm,” James Lackey, a self-employed Florida investor who placed trades for Niederhoffer from 2002 to 2006, told me. “But I quickly realized that I didn’t know very much. What he taught me was how to approach the market as a whole, and how to analyze it scientifically. He was just amazing at seeing what was happening and showing us how to make money.”
1997年亚洲金融危机以后，尼德霍夫几年无所事事。然后，在50多岁时，他的事业又回复了。他成立3只对冲基金，并开了一个网站：dailyspeculation.com，他在这个网站发表自己独特的股市观点。“我们从市场的稀有品种学到了什么？”他在5月写道——就像关于体育，政治和文化的观点一样（百老汇正在上演的《异想天开》是不错的音乐剧。）他培养了几十个成功的交易者，很多人把他当作大师。有一个个人投资者叫詹姆士·拉克，他2002年到2006年替尼德霍夫下单，他告诉我：“我以前为华尔街的公司打工，后来为维克多做事。但我发现自己懂的东西不多。他叫我用整体的观点理解市场，并科学地分析市场。他很神奇地教我们赚钱。”
Niederhoffer, a former national squash champion who is considered one of the most talented Americans to have played the game, relishes the acclaim, but he knows that in his field circumstances can change quickly. By the end of August, his funds were in trouble, and on Wall Street rumors circulated that he would soon be out of business again. Niederhoffer had been worried all summer, but he tried to project a wry, self-deprecating humor. “If an event like 1997 occurred again, my dependents would be up the creek, and I would be a night watchman somewhere, just like Captain Pollard,” he said to me when I visited him at his home one morning in June. “In America, they give you a second chance but not a third.”
尼德霍夫过去是壁球冠军，有人认为他是最有天赋的球员之一，虽然他很喜欢这个说法，但他知道他所在的环境变化很快。到了8月底，他的基金出了麻烦，华尔街流言说他又要破产了。整个夏天，尼德霍夫都很担心，但是他自我解嘲地说：“如果像1997年的事再次发生，我就惨了，我可能就要像波拉德船长一样去看门了。”6月的一天，我去他家参观，他告诉我：“在美国，他们会给你第二次机会，但不会给你第三次机会。”
Tall and trim (he still looks like an athlete), with closely cropped white hair, olive skin, and a long, expressive face, Niederhoffer speaks softly, with a strong Brooklyn accent. He was wearing a yellow shirt, pink trousers, and white socks, but no shoes—he maintains a “no shoes” rule in the office, to reduce noise—and was sitting behind his desk, which is dominated by two Bloomberg screens, in a large room over the garage which he shares with his partner, Steve Wisdom, and several members of his company, Manchester Trading. (The trading operation fits into two rooms; the other one is over the kitchen.) In one hand, he was holding a telephone receiver, and his light-blue eyes were fixed on the computer screens. “The market’s way down today,” he said by way of greeting. Turning back to the telephone and addressing his broker at the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, he asked, “Can you repeat those quotes, please?” After a few seconds, he said, “I’ll sell two hundred red March at five hundred and ten. I’ll sell two hundred blue March at eleven ten.”
尼德霍夫又高又瘦（看起来还像运动员），白色的头发齐齐的，橄榄色的皮肤，脸比较长，表情丰富，他说话声音低，带有强烈的布鲁克林口音。他穿着黄色的衬衫，但不穿鞋——他在办公室不穿鞋，目的是为了减少噪音——他坐在桌子后面，桌子上面有2个大屏幕，显示着报价行情，在停车房上面有个大房间，他和史蒂夫·威斯顿以及其他一些曼彻斯特交易公司的同事在一起交易。（他们分在两个房间，其他人则在厨房的上面的房间。）另一方面，他还拿着电话，蓝色的眼睛盯着屏幕。他一边迎接我，一边说：“今天市场跌了。”他转过身，继续和芝加哥商业交易所的经纪人通话，他问：“请你再讲一下报价，好吗？”几秒钟后，他说：“我将在510卖出200份5月份红色合约。我将在1110卖出200份3月份蓝色。”
The Chicago Merc is a futures market, where people trade contracts that give them the right to purchase a particular commodity at a specified date in the future. Originally, the items traded on the exchange were physical commodities, such as eggs, butter, and pigs, and its main customers were farmers and food companies. In recent decades, futures trading has become more abstract; professional speculators now use the exchange to place bets on the prices of financial securities, such as stocks, bonds, and currencies—a development that Niederhoffer, a former math prodigy who has a Ph.D. in economics, has exploited. He likes to be at his desk well before the Chicago market opens, especially on days when he has big positions riding overnight. He is mainly a short-term operator—he bets on how prices will move in the subsequent few minutes, hours, or days—and most of his knowledge of current events comes from Bloomberg. (He doesn’t read newspapers or watch television.) When he arrives at his office, he turns on his computer and reads about developments in the Asian and European markets, which often foreshadow the day’s action in the United States.
芝加哥商业交易所是期货市场，人们交易的合约约定人们在将来特定的日期交割一定的商品。最初，市场只交易实物，比如鸡蛋，油和猪，主要客户是农民和食品公司。最近几十年，期货交易变得更加抽象，专业的投机者在赌金融证券的价格，比如股票，债券，外汇——尼德霍夫过去是经济学博士，还是数学天才，他就交易这些东西。他喜欢在开盘的时候坐在桌子前面，尤其是头天晚上持有很多的仓位的时候。他基本上是短线交易者——他赌价格在几分钟，几小时或几天内的变化——他大部分市场事件知识来自彭博社。（他不看报纸，不看电视。）当他到办公室的时候，他打开电脑，了解亚洲和欧洲的市场情况，这些市场预示了美国市场的当天行为。
At the end of the previous week, the yield on ten-year Treasury bonds had surged to almost five per cent, prompting Niederhoffer to turn uncharacteristically bearish on stocks. Once the bond yield reached five per cent, he had reasoned, some investors would move their money from stocks to bonds, which would depress stock prices. Accordingly, he had sold short more than a billion dollars’ worth of stock futures. (Selling short, a common tactic among speculators, involves selling something you don’t own with the intention of buying it back later, at a cheaper price. If the price of the security falls while you are “short,” you make a profit; if the price rises, you lose money.)
上个周末，10年期债券几乎涨了5%，促使尼德霍夫去看空股票。一旦债券涨幅超过5%，他就知道有些投资者会把资金从股票转移到债券，这样就打压了股票的价格。故，他已经做空了10亿多的股指期货。（做空是投机者的普遍战术，也就是卖出你并不拥有的东西，然后再更便宜的价格买回来。如果证券的价格在你做空之后下跌了，你就赚钱了，如果价格涨了，你就亏钱了。）
Even by Niederhoffer’s generous standards, going short a billion dollars of stock futures was a large bet, but it worked out well. Not long after the markets reopened on Monday, the bond yield climbed to five per cent, and stocks and stock futures tumbled. On Wednesday, the morning of my visit, shortly after the opening bell sounded on Wall Street, Niederhoffer repurchased the futures he had sold, making more than five million dollars.
即使按照尼德霍夫的标准，做空10亿美元的股指期货也是赌博，但是结果很赚钱。当周一开市时，债券涨了5%，股票和股指期货则下跌。到了周三我参观的时候，也就是华尔街开盘的时候，尼德霍夫买入了他之前做空的期货，结果赚了500多万美元。
He didn’t look pleased, though. During the morning, stocks had continued to fall, and he knew that if he had waited he could have made an even bigger profit. He says that in twenty-eight years as a professional investor he hasn’t had a single truly satisfactory trading day. At eleven o’clock, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had slipped about a hundred points and the S. & P. 500 Index was down about thirteen points. Niederhoffer stared morosely at his Bloomberg screens. “The score doesn’t look good,” he muttered. The screens were tracking the movements of various stock-market indices in Europe and Latin America, but I noticed that they weren’t displaying any American prices. Niederhoffer used to invest heavily overseas, but since his 1997 misadventure in Thai stocks he has confined his trading to the United States. He explained that when the U.S. market was falling he preferred to track the DAX, a German stock index that generally moves in synch with the American market. “You can see how much you are losing, but it doesn’t hurt as much as watching the S. & P.,” he said.
但是他看起来并不高兴。在那天上午，股票继续下跌，如果他再等等，他可以赚的更多。他说交易28年来，他没有一天为自己的交易真正感到满意。11点时，道琼斯工业指数跌了100点，标准普尔500股指期货跌了13点。尼德霍夫愁眉苦脸地看着屏幕上的报价自言自语地说：“我的成绩不怎么样。”屏幕上显示了欧洲和拉丁美洲的股市报价，但是我发现没有美国的报价。尼德霍夫过去喜欢在海外大量投资，但是自从1997年的泰国股市恶运以来，他主要交易美国的市场。他向我解释说，如果美国股市下跌，他宁愿跟踪德国的股指，因为它一般是跟踪美国市场的。他说：“你可以知道自己亏了多少，但比看标准普尔股指期货要好。”
Before long, Niederhoffer cheered up a bit. “There have been three big down opens in a row, which is unusual,” he said. “The market doesn’t like to do the same things repeatedly.” He turned to Alex Castaldo, a thin, bespectacled fifty-three-year-old Italian who has a degree in electrical engineering from M.I.T. and a Ph.D. in finance from CUNY, and asked him to compile some data. “Doc,” he said to Castaldo, “what does the market do when it opens down a lot three days in a row?” A few minutes later, Castaldo handed Niederhoffer a computer printout, which showed that since the start of 2003 there had been just ten occasions on which, for three consecutive days, the S. & P. 500 had fallen sharply in the first hour and a half of trading. On eight of those occasions, stocks had bounced back, with the average market rise by the end of the following trading day amounting to three tenths of one per cent. For a trader like Niederhoffer, who uses leverage—borrowed money—to scale up his bets, the ability to predict even relatively small changes in the market can pay off handsomely.
很快，尼德霍夫就高兴了，他说：“市场总是跳空低开，这不寻常。市场不会总是这样。”他转向亚历克斯·卡斯达多，亚历克斯长的瘦，戴眼镜，53岁，意大利人，拥有美国理工大学的电气工程学位和纽约大学的金融博士学位，尼德霍夫叫亚历克斯处理一些数据：“博士，如果市场连续3天跳空低开很多，市场下一步会如何？”几分钟后，卡斯达多把打印件给了尼德霍夫，打印件表明自从2003年以来，标准普尔500股指期货有10次在1.5个小时内下跌，且跌了3天。有8次股票反弹了，在第4天反弹了百分之一的10分之3。像尼德霍夫这样的交易者，他使用杠杆——借来的钱——去赌短线，在市场如果有能力预测到一个小办法都能赚很多钱。
The software that Niederhoffer uses to identify stock-price patterns is a version of the code that he wrote thirty years ago. Many hedge funds and Wall Street banks now rely on such programs to spot potentially lucrative market fluctuations and place orders automatically—a practice known as “black box” investing—but Niederhoffer is scornful of this method. Although markets sometimes move in predictable ways, he says, the patterns change constantly, and reliance on mathematical algorithms can be disastrous. At Manchester Trading, Niederhoffer or Wisdom reviews each trade before it is placed.
尼德霍夫使用的分析软件是他30年前编的。很多对冲基金和华尔街的银行都是依靠软件去找到潜在的赚钱的机会并自动下单——其实就是“黑盒子”投资——但是尼德霍夫看不起这个办法。他说虽然有时候市场确实和预测的方向一致，但模式总是在变，依靠数学编程可能是灾难性的。在曼彻斯特公司，尼德霍夫和威斯顿在下单前都要互相检查一下。
In this instance, Niederhoffer expected the market to rebound, but he decided to hold off on buying. Morgan Stanley had just issued a notice advising its clients to reduce their stock holdings. “Plus, the Fed has been making bearish noises,” Niederhoffer said. A few minutes earlier, the Dow had dropped below thirteen thousand five hundred. Castaldo went over to Niederhoffer’s Bloomberg and called up some U.S. stock charts. Niederhoffer, looking at the falling lines, announced, “It’s gone down two per cent—that’s enough.” Then he turned to Owen Wilson, a young Englishman who has worked for him for a couple of years. Holding a phone to his ear, Wilson shouted out quotes from the Chicago Merc. “Buy a hundred and fifty at eighteen seventy-five,” Niederhoffer said. Wilson placed the trades and called out more numbers. Again, Niederhoffer told him to buy. Within a few minutes, Wilson had purchased tens of millions of dollars’ worth of stock futures.
此时，尼德霍夫希望市场反弹，但是他不想买入。摩根士坦利刚刚给客户发了一个顾问通知，叫他们减仓。尼德霍夫说：“另外，美联储也发布了看空的噪音。”几分钟前，道琼斯跌到了13500以下。卡斯达多走到尼德霍夫的屏幕前面，看了几个美股的图表。尼德霍夫看着下跌的曲线宣布：“跌了2%——够了。”然后他转向欧文·威尔逊，欧文是英国人，已经为他工作了几年。欧文拿着电话，大声喊出报价。尼德霍夫说：“在50买入100份，在1875买入150份。”威尔逊下单并报出了更大的数字。然后尼德霍夫叫他再次买入。几分钟内，威尔逊就买了几千万美元的股指期货。
Niederhoffer received his first lessons in finance as a child growing up in Brighton Beach. He learned to bet on stoopball, paddleball, and checkers, which he played with other local kids, and with adults who went by nicknames such as Bitter Irving, Bookie, and Nervous Phil. His father, Artie, a New York City cop who spent twenty years on the force before becoming a professor of sociology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, tried unsuccessfully to dissuade him from gambling. “Everything was a money game,” Niederhoffer told me. “My father hated it, but I loved to win a nickel or a dime.” With the encouragement of his uncle Howie, who was in high school, he also placed wagers on professional sports. In October, 1951, on Yom Kippur, Howie and Victor, who was eight, sneaked out of synagogue and bet eight hundred dollars on the Brooklyn Dodgers, who were playing the New York Giants in a pennant-decider. When Bobby Thomson hit his famous home run, defeating the Dodgers, Howie and Victor were devastated. (The knowledge that only two of the lost dollars were Niederhoffer’s did little to console him.)
尼德霍夫小时候在布莱顿海滩就学到了金融方面的知识。尼德霍夫和玩伴们玩街头棒球，扳手球和下棋的时候就知道如何下注，他还和大人玩，包括比特而·欧文，布基和紧张的飞利浦。他爸爸叫阿蒂，过去20年在纽约做警察，然后成为约翰杰司法学院的社会学教授，他爸叫他不要赌博，但是失败了。尼德霍夫告诉我：“任何事都是关于钱的游戏。我爸讨厌赌博，但是我喜欢去赚点钱。”他的叔叔豪伊支持他，豪伊在中学工作，他喜欢赌马等体育。1951年10月，赎罪日这天，豪伊和当时8岁的维克多溜出犹太教会，花了800美元去赌布鲁克林道奇队，当时这个队正在和纽约巨人队打棒球。当波比·汤姆森打出了著名的本垒打，打败了道奇队时，豪伊和维克多就亏光了。（事后来看，这次亏的钱并不多，这对尼德霍夫是一个安慰。）
Niederhoffer says that as far back as the Middle Ages his ancestors were money changers. At the end of the nineteenth century, his paternal great-grandparents moved from Austria to the Lower East Side, where several of their seven sons sold fruit from a horse and cart. Niederhoffer’s grandfather Martie, who had a good head for figures, became an accountant. In the boom years of the nineteen-twenties, Martie borrowed money and invested it in real estate and stocks, assembling a portfolio that made him nearly a millionaire. The stock-market crash of October, 1929, destroyed most of his wealth; two years later, the market dived again, wiping out what he had left.
尼德霍夫说他的祖辈都是金融家。19实际末，他爸爸的曾祖父，曾祖母从澳大利亚移民到东部下城区，他们的7个儿子用马车卖水果。尼德霍夫的祖父叫马蒂，他精通数字，做了会计。在20年代的繁荣时期，马蒂借钱并投资房地产和股市，差点成为百万富翁。1929年股市崩盘，他把大部分钱都亏了，2年后，股市又跌了，他剩下来的钱也亏了。
Martie, who spoke Yiddish and pidgin Spanish, got a job as a translator in a Brooklyn courthouse. But he retained an interest in the stock market, and in 1954 he financed Victor’s first equity investment: a hundred shares of the Benguet Mining Company, which was trading at fifty cents. For several years, the stock hardly moved. Then, in just a few months, it doubled in value. On Martie’s advice, Victor sold his shares, and made a profit of fifty dollars. During the next thirty-six months, the stock’s value increased to thirty dollars a share. “I have repeated the mistake of grabbing at small profits and selling at a targeted round number over and over in my speculative career,” he wrote in “The Education of a Speculator,” a memoir that he published in 1997. “I believe many others make this same error.”
马蒂会说依地语和西班牙语，他在布鲁克林法院找了一个工作做翻译。但是他对股市还是有兴趣，1954年他资助维克多投资，买了当时价格是50分的班格特矿产公司100股股票。几个月后，就翻番了。根据马蒂的建议，维克多把股票卖了，赚了50美元。之后的3年中，股票的价格涨到了每股30美元。他在1997年出版的回忆录《投机者教育》中写道：“在我的投机生涯中，我总是犯这样的错误：为了赚点小利润，在某个整数价位就卖掉了。我知道很多人都容易犯这个错误。”
At the age of six, Niederhoffer says, he was such an accomplished paddle-tennis player that he had to spot his opponents fifteen points a game. At thirteen, he defeated a seventeen-year-old to win the New York City junior singles tennis championship. (In school, his competitiveness elicited mixed reactions. At the end of his last year at P.S. 225, his sixth-grade teacher wrote, “Although a little trying at times, you were the spark the class needed this year. You have a keen mind; learn to curb your inclinations to demonstrate superiority.”) At Abraham Lincoln High School on Ocean Parkway, Niederhoffer was the president of his class, the captain of the tennis team, the star of the math team, a pianist in the orchestra, a clarinettist in the band, the sports editor of the newspaper, and a frequent contributor to Vanguard, the school magazine. In an article that appeared in the June, 1958, issue, Niederhoffer warned that automation “will require a complete reorientation” in the attitudes of trade unions. Five months later, displaying a view of government intervention that he would later renounce, he argued that “federal aid to education is imperative if equality of educational opportunity in our democracy is to have real meaning.”
尼德霍夫说他在6岁时网球打的很好，每局比赛他能赢对手15个点。13岁时，他打败了17岁的对手，赢得了纽约市少年组的网球冠军。（在学校，他的竞争性引起了不同的反应。他在P.S. 225学校的最后一年里，他的6年级老师写道：“虽然有时候需要努力，但你是本班需要的火花。你头脑敏锐。但要学会不能太招摇。”）在海洋大道上的亚伯拉罕林肯高中，他是班里的领导人物，网球队长，数学明星，在管弦乐队弹钢琴，吹单簧管，为报纸做体育编辑，为学校的杂志《先锋》撰稿。在1958年的6月的一篇文章中，尼德霍夫警告交易自动化：“需要完全的重新定位。”5个月后，他又反对政府的干预，后来他又否决了，他说：“如果我们的民主说教育机会是平等的，那么联邦的教育干预是专横的。”
Niederhoffer’s father, whom he idolized, encouraged his athletic and intellectual pursuits, and his mother, Elaine, who was descended from a long line of rabbis, pressed him and his younger brother and sister—now, respectively, a commodity-fund adviser and a psychiatric social worker—to succeed. “My mother was never content,” Niederhoffer told me. “She pushed us to be No. 1.” In January, 1960, at his mother’s urging, he applied to Harvard. In a letter of recommendation, his academic adviser and tennis coach, Milton Hecht, wrote, “Victor ranks among the first in intellectual achievement and promise in comparison with the thousands of students I have taught in the last thirty years.” Harvard awarded him a partial scholarship, as did Columbia and the University of Pennsylvania. Niederhoffer chose Harvard, where he majored in economics.
尼德霍夫的爸爸还是鼓励他搞体育并发展智力上的追求。他的妈妈叫伊莱恩，祖上都是信犹太教的，他妈总是逼他，他的弟弟和妹妹去成功——他的弟弟现在是商品顾问，他妹妹是精神病方面的义工。尼德霍夫告诉我：“我妈总是不满意。她逼我们成为最优秀的。”在1960年1月，在他妈的催促下，他申请到哈佛念书。在推荐信中，他的学校顾问和网球教练米尔顿·赫奇特写道：“维克多是我过去30年中所教的几千个学生中最聪明的，最有前途的学生。”哈佛大学给了他部分奖学金，哥伦比亚大学和宾夕法尼亚大学都提出了同样的条件，他最终选择了哈佛大学，他的专业是经济学。
Niederhoffer spent less time in the classroom than he did on the squash court. Until he moved to Cambridge, he had never played squash—or squash racquets, as it was then called—but the physical demands of the game appealed to him. He borrowed every book on squash at the Widener Library, and took some with him to the practice court, where he opened them on the floor and repeatedly copied the moves they described. In 1962, as an eighteen-year-old sophomore, Niederhoffer won the junior championship of the National Intercollegiate Squash Racquets Association. A year later, he won the Harry Cowles tournament, a prestigious competition for amateurs. “He has good size, quickness, and a skillful touch,” his Harvard coach, Jack Barnaby, told the News and Views of Harvard Sports, a campus publication, in January, 1963. “But a lot of players have those attributes. What he has beyond that is one of the most competitive characters I’ve ever seen. He makes you feel like you are watching a person of Ty Cobb’s cut in action again.”
尼德霍夫花在课堂上的时间没有花在网球上的时间多。他到剑桥大学之前没有打网球，但是对他来说，非常有吸引力。他到伟德恩图书馆借来所有关于网球的书，并在学球的时候也带着这些书，他翻开书，照着书中的内容去打球。1962年，作为18岁的大二学生，尼德霍夫赢得了网球协会的国家大学赛的冠军。1年后，他赢了哈里考雷斯锦标赛，这是业余选手的荣誉。他的哈佛教练杰克·巴纳比在1963年1月的《哈佛体育新闻观察》中说：“他体形好，动作快，技术强。但是很多运动员都有这些特点。我认为他的强项就是他的个性具有很强的竞争力。他让你觉得就是在现场看泰·柯布的比赛。”
In the 1963-64 season, Niederhoffer, now a senior, was captain of the Harvard squash team, which went undefeated. He also won the individual national collegiate title, and his aggressive playing style attracted the attention of a reporter at Sports Illustrated, who wrote, “Niederhoffer thinks he is unbeatable and clamors loudly for justice when his shots go awry. Consequently, on those rare occasions when he loses a tournament, squash lovers are delighted.” The reporter quoted Niederhoffer’s freshman coach, Corey Wynn, who recalled his former student’s penchant for “handballing it”—physically blocking his opponents from reaching the ball, a tactic that was frowned upon in New England. Niederhoffer’s mother read the article and consulted a Fifth Avenue law firm, Cohn & Glickstein, about suing Sports Illustrated for libel. (On the firm’s advice, she decided not to file a suit.)
63——64年，尼德霍夫成人了，他是哈佛网球队的队长，这个球队没输过。他还取得了全国大学赛的个人冠军，他的进取风格引起了《体育画报》记者的注意，他写道：“尼德霍夫认为自己是不可战胜的，当他的球打偏了，他就大吵大闹要公平。结果是，有时候他没有拿到冠军，网球爱好者就高兴了。”记者引用了尼德霍夫大一教练科里·怀恩的话，科里回忆了这个学生的爱好——他能阻止对手碰到球，这个战术在新英格兰是禁止使用的。尼德霍夫的妈妈看到这篇报道，然后去找第五大街的约翰和格里斯坦律师行商量，他准备告《体育画报》诽谤。（在律师行的建议下，他妈没有打这个官司。）
In February, 1966, Niederhoffer won the U.S. national amateur championship, the culmination of a series of important victories. Sports Illustrated and Time sent reporters to these events, and Niederhoffer wasn’t pleased with the coverage. First, he wrote to Time, denying its claim that during the national championship he had offered odds of two-to-one against himself. An editor replied, defending the magazine’s reporting as having been based on “reliable sources.” Unsatisfied, Niederhoffer wrote another letter, to a senior executive at Time-Life, the parent company of both Time and Sports Illustrated, complaining that the articles had “created the impression that I was a poor boy from Brooklyn who had adjusted badly to the rigors of a social sport.”
1966年2月，尼德霍夫打赢了很多比赛，最终赢得了国家业余冠军。《体育画报》和《时代》杂志派记者去报道，但尼德霍夫对报道不满。首先，他写信给《时代》，否认所谓的在冠军赛中他为自己制造了2：1的优势。一个编辑回信说，根据可靠的资料，这个报道是真实的。尼德霍夫不满意，又写了一封信给“时代生活”的高管，“时代生活”是《时代》和《体育画报》的母公司，他抱怨这些报道“说我在布鲁克林时就是一个坏小孩，在体育比赛时表现更坏。”
An aura of class and ethnic prejudice pervaded press accounts of Niederhoffer’s achievements; he was widely viewed as an ill-mannered upstart from the wrong side of the East River. The Times Magazine noted that he was “built wrong for a squash player: not lithe and wiry, or even tall and gracefully powerful. He is shaped rather like a block—fairly broad in the shoulders, no waist, thick shapeless legs—and his color is sallow, the deep oyster sallow of a New York street creature.” In Chicago, where Niederhoffer moved in 1964, to attend graduate school, he couldn’t find a squash club that would admit him. He was so offended that for several years he gave up the game.
媒体认为尼德霍夫的成就和种族歧视有关系，很多人认为这个粗鲁的来自东河的新秀有问题。《时代》杂志说他是“他不适合做网球选手，他不敏捷，没有韧性，也不高，没有力量。他的体形像墙——肩膀宽，没有灵活的关节，腿太粗——皮肤苍白。”尼德霍夫1964年搬到芝加哥，去上研究生，没有一个网球俱乐部愿意接受他。他很受挫折，几年后他就放弃了网球。
After he returned to the court, in 1972, he won the national amateur championship four years running, an unprecedented feat. In January, 1975, in Mexico City, he won the North American Open, a major professional tournament, defeating the legendary Pakistani player Sharif Khan in four games. Afterward, Niederhoffer wasn’t very gracious. “Khan had a fatal plan—a lack of real toughness,” he told Sports Illustrated. “He’s been winning so long he doesn’t know anymore what it is to play a battle to the death.”
他于1972年重返赛场，他连续4年赢得了业余组的全国冠军，空前漂亮。1975年1月，他在墨西哥市赢得了北美公开赛，这是专业的锦标赛，4次打败了传奇人物巴基斯坦的选手沙利夫·可汗。之后，尼德霍夫就没有那么光荣了。他告诉《体育画报》：“可汗有一个致命的计划——不够强悍。他赢的时间太长了，他不知道什么是决死一战。”
Shortly after noon, a housekeeper’s voice announced over an intercom, “Victor’s lunch is ready. Does he want it?” “No,” Niederhoffer replied. “I can’t eat lunch with the market like this.” He looked at his screens. “Europe got killed,” he said to nobody in particular. He was still irked by Morgan Stanley’s bearish notice to clients. “If the big brokerage houses are going to make money from commissions, they have to get people selling as well as buying,” he said dismissively. Unlike most Wall Street firms, Manchester Trading doesn’t have a television in its trading room, partly because Niederhoffer doesn’t want to be distracted but also because he can’t abide doom-mongering market commentators, like Alan Abelson, a columnist for Barron’s, the financial weekly, and Robert Prechter, Jr., the publisher of the Elliot Wave Theorist. “These people have been bearish since Dow 700,” Niederhoffer said angrily. “When the market is going up, they can’t get a hearing. But when the market falls they get invited back on. They say it’s like 1997, or 1987, or 2002. How about 1907? That was a bad year. Interest rates went up; the market went down by nearly fifty per cent.”
午后不久，管家对讲机上问：“维克多的午餐准备好了，还想吃吗？”尼德霍夫回答：“不想吃。市场这个样子，我吃不下。”他看着屏幕自言自语地说：“欧洲市场被屠杀了。”摩根士坦利给客户的看空通知一直让他苦恼。他轻蔑地说：“如果经纪公司想靠佣金赚钱，他们就要像让人们买入一样叫人们卖出。”和大部分华尔街的公司不同，曼彻斯特交易公司的交易室里面没有电视，一部分原因是尼德霍夫不想分心，还有一个原因是他受不了有些人天天忽悠世界末日，比如《巴伦》周刊的专栏作家艾伦·阿巴森，还有《艾略特波浪理论家》的出版人罗伯特·普瑞切。尼德霍夫生气地说：“自从道琼斯工业指数到了700点，他们就天天看空。当市场上涨的时候，每人理他们的。但是当市场下跌的时候，就有人邀请他们发言。他们说就像1997，1987或2002年一样，那么1907年会如何？1907年很惨，利息上涨，市场跌了接近50%。”
Just after one o’clock, the market hit a new low for the day, with the Dow down about a hundred and twenty-five points, and the S. & P. 500 down about fourteen points. It is a strange feature of financial markets that time occasionally seems to speed up. On quiet days, when prices aren’t moving much, traders monitor their positions, read the papers, and chat with each other, and it can seem as though an eternity passes before the closing bell sounds. But when the market becomes volatile every move brings with it a fresh opportunity for profit or loss, and each minute can fly by. The mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot, who pioneered the application of chaos theory to financial markets, refers to this phenomenon as the “multifractal nature of trading time.”
1点钟以后，市场到达当天的最低点。道琼斯跌了125点，标准普尔500跌了14点。金融市场就奇怪在到了那个时点市场有时候会加速上涨。在平静的交易日里，如果价格波动不大，交易者就监视自己的仓位，看报纸，聊天，在收盘的钟声响起前，这段时间似乎很漫长。但是当市场波动厉害的时候，那么就有机会赚钱或亏钱，每一分钟都过的那么快。伯尼特·曼德尔布罗特是数学家，他首先把混沌理论运用到金融市场，他说这种现象是交易时间的不规则性。
Niederhoffer turned to Castaldo. “This day is far from over,” he said. “Doc, what happens when the market is down twelve points at one o’clock and it has been down significantly the previous two days?” A few minutes later, Castaldo handed him another computer printout. “Most of the time, these computer analyses don’t work, but it gives you an anchor,” Niederhoffer said as he scanned the sheet. “My checkers teacher said even a bad system is better than no system at all.” The data showed that the last time trading seemed to follow the current pattern was between November, 2000, and September, 2002, when there had been eight such three-day periods. In most of these instances, the market had rebounded strongly during the subsequent seventy-two hours. Niederhoffer looked at Owen Wilson. “I’ll buy another fifty at eleven-fifty,” he said.
尼德霍夫转向卡斯达多。他说：“今天还没结束。博士，你看看，如果市场已经严重地下跌了2天，今天又在1点钟跌了12点，那么接着会如何？”几分钟后，卡斯达多又给他一张打印件。尼德霍夫在看的时候说：“大部分时间，这些电脑分析的结果并没有效果，但是它们会给你一个依靠。我的经济学老师告诉我，即使是差的系统也比没有系统好。”数据表明在2000年11月到2002年9月间有8次出现了这样的连续3天下跌的现象。在大部分情况下，市场会在其后3天内强力反弹。尼德霍夫看着欧文·威尔逊说：“我要在1150再买入50份。”
Niederhoffer’s investment philosophy is based on a belief that over the long term the market goes up, but over the short term it constantly reverses itself. In his books—his second, “Practical Speculation,” was published in 2003—he compares the behavior of investors to that of herds of rampaging elephants that retrace their steps over and over. He refers to this pattern as a “LoBagola,” after Bata LoBagola, the author of “LoBagola: An African Savage’s Own Story,” a book published in 1930 describing the customs and wildlife of West Africa. After the book appeared, LoBagola was revealed to be an African-American vaudeville entertainer from Baltimore, the son of a former slave. In a 2004 post on DailySpeculations.com, Niederhoffer wrote, “Regrettably LoBagola was an American con man. . . . Nevertheless, I claim that despite his imposture, the moves back and forth in big markets often follow a LoBagola, and even though, nay especially because, LoBagola was an impostor his name should be given to major moves which would seem to follow a symmetry up and down.”
尼德霍夫的投资理念的基础是：长期而言，市场会涨，短期而言，市场总是反转。在他2003年出版的第二本书《投机实战》（中信翻译成《华尔街赌局》）中——他把投资者和暴躁的一次又一次地重复自己步调的大象做比较。他把这种现象叫做娄巴格拉，取自巴塔·娄巴格拉的书《娄巴格拉：一个非洲野人的自传》，此书1930年出版，描述了西非的风俗和生活。自从此书出版以后，娄巴格拉成为非洲舞者的代名词。尼德霍夫2004年在dailyspeculations.com写道：“很可惜娄巴格拉是非洲人……除了市场的似是而非之外，市场上上下下的波动就像娄巴格拉一样，娄巴格拉舞踪不定，市场上上下下也不定。”
Niederhoffer doesn’t claim to be able to say what the Dow or the S. & P. 500 will do next week or next month, but he believes that over shorter periods—hours or days—there are sometimes predictable patterns that can be exploited. In “The Education of a Speculator,” he devotes an entire chapter to this notion, comparing the market’s movements to some of his favorite pieces of classical music, and juxtaposing pages of sheet music with stock charts. “When the markets are moving in my favor in a nice, gentle way—never below my initial price—I often think of the ‘Trout Quintet,’ ” he writes. “Another frequent work I hear in the market is Haydn’s Symphony No. 94. . . . Right after lunch, or before a holiday, the markets have a tendency to meander up and down in a five-point range above and below the opening. The pattern is similar to the twinkling C-major fifths of Haydn’s symphony.”
尼德霍夫无法预测道琼斯或标准普尔500下周或下个月的走势，但是他相信在短期内——几个小时或几天内——有些模式是可以预测的。在《投机者养成教育》中，他用整个章节谈自己的理念，把市场的波动和自己最喜欢的经典音乐对比，把乐谱和股票图形放在一起看。他写道：“当市场在优雅轻柔地波动时——永远在我的成本之上时——我经常想到《鳟鱼五重奏》。另外，我还会在市场中听到海顿的94号交响乐……在午饭后或放假前，市场喜欢在开盘价上下5个点的范围内上上下下。这个模式和海顿的C调第5交响乐很相似。”
In the early eighties, when he was making a presentation to potential clients, Niederhoffer sometimes took along Robert Schrade, a friend who was a classical pianist. After Niederhoffer talked about his methods, Schrade would demonstrate the rhythms of the market on the piano. This double act didn’t always impress investors. “CalPERS”—the California Public Employees’ Retirement System—“is not going to be interested in investing with Victor, nor is the Harvard endowment,” Paul DeRosa, a partner at the hedge fund Mt. Lucas who has known Niederhoffer since the late seventies, said to me. “Your basic, buttoned-down endowment, advised by professional consultants, wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole. His is a fund that is going to appeal to people like him: self-made people who have a maverick streak.”
在80年代初，尼德霍夫在给潜在客户演讲的时候，总是带上罗伯特·素雷德，这个朋友会弹钢琴。当尼德霍夫演讲完以后，素雷德就用钢琴来解释市场的节奏。但这个组合并没有让投资者有什么深刻印象。卢卡斯对冲基金的保罗·蒂柔沙在70年代末就认识尼德霍夫，他告诉我：“加州事业性员工退休系统没兴趣投资给维克多，哈佛养老金基金也没兴趣。守旧的养老金是不会碰他的。他的基金只能吸引这样的人：有不同想法的人。”
A few months ago, after visiting a Redwood forest in Northern California, Niederhoffer became fascinated by the ecology of trees. He bought several books on the subject and posted an article on his Web site applying what he had learned about trees to the stock market:
几个月前，尼德霍夫在北加州参观了红木森林以后，他就对生态学感到着迷。他买了一些书，并在自己的网站上面说他从书木中学到了一些股市知识：
Lesson Two: The forest thrives and benefits after many seemingly disastrous events. Fires clear the underbrush. Dead trees still standing provide cover for much flora and fauna. Trees contain so much water that there is still much biomass left when they die, and they contain the nutrients and moisture that other plants or fungi need for survival. This situation is called a biological legacy by the scientists, but is just known as a gift by the laymen.
第二课：森林经历了很多灾难性的事件之后生存并繁荣下来。或清理了小草。死数为植物和动物提供保护。书富含水分，死后还有很多物质存在，这些营养物质和潮湿是其它植物或真菌需要的。科学家把这种情况称为生物遗传，外行称为礼物。
The number of, the amount of time in between, and the extent of watershed declines that the market has witnessed in the last year, as well as the resilience of the market to these declines, is a good measure of the health of a system. It is often good for future growth, to see decimated parts of the market landscape, such as the U.S. real-estate sector, which has currently taken it on the chin, or the Saudi Arabian market, which is down 75%.
市场下跌的时间，反弹的时间，这些都是衡量系统健康的东西。它对期货有好处，能看到市场的一部分状况，比如美国的房地产已经让人喜上眉梢了，或者是沙特阿拉伯的市场，跌了75%。
After he wrote the article, Niederhoffer gave the books he had read to one of his employees, Charles Pennington, a former professor of physics, and asked him to develop precise numerical analogies between the life cycles of forests and those of corporations, in the hope that the exercise might suggest some profitable investments. Niederhoffer’s employees are used to such requests. “Things sometimes work that you wouldn’t believe, and things don’t work that you would expect to work,” Steve Wisdom said to me after we had left Niederhoffer at his desk and gone downstairs to eat lunch in his formal dining room. (The dining room is next to the library, where Niederhoffer keeps his collection of rare books and manuscripts, including a first edition of Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations” and a copy of David Ricardo’s “Principles of Political Economy and Taxation” which has margin notes by Thomas Malthus.)
尼德霍夫写完文章后，他把自己看过的书给自己的一个员工看，这个员工叫查尔斯·潘宁顿，过去是物理学教授，尼德霍夫叫他用数字模拟森林循环和公司起落，以期待这种模拟也许能帮忙找到赚钱的投资机会。尼德霍夫的员工对这种要求习以为常。史蒂夫·威斯顿在离开尼德霍夫的办公桌下楼吃饭的时候告诉我：“有时候你信它，结果它不会发生；有时候你不信它，结果它发生了。”（餐厅在图书馆隔壁，尼德霍夫在图书馆收集了很多罕见的书和手稿，包括亚当·斯密第一版的《国富论》和托马斯·马尔萨斯在旁边做了笔记大卫·里卡多写的《政治经济学及税赋原理》。）
Wisdom, a clean-cut man of forty-six, met Niederhoffer twenty-five years ago, in New York City, when Wisdom was a philosophy major at Harvard and the chairman of the university’s Libertarian Club. “We hit it off, and that was that,” Wisdom recalled. After graduating, in 1983, Wisdom worked for Niederhoffer for fourteen years, until Niederhoffer’s business collapsed, in 1997. He returned in 2003, largely, he told me, because of Niederhoffer’s willingness to try new ideas. “Everyone has computers; everyone has Ukrainian math Ph.D.s,” Wisdom said. “There are people chopping at the data every which way. Making money is not easy, and it requires a lot of creativity. Victor always says, ‘Suppose I didn’t know anything. Suppose I’d never traded this instrument before. What would I think?’ ”
威斯顿46岁，衣冠整洁，他25年在纽约就认识了尼德霍夫，威斯顿在哈佛修哲学，而且还是大学自由俱乐部的主席。威斯顿回忆说：“我们很投缘。”1983年毕业后，威斯顿开始为尼德霍夫工作，一直工作了14年，直到1997年尼德霍夫破产。他在2003年又回来了，他告诉我是因为尼德霍夫想试试新方法。威斯顿说：“每个人都有电脑，每个人都有乌克兰的数学博士学位。每天都要分析数据。赚钱不容易，它需要很多创造性。维克多总是说‘假如我什么都不知道，假如我从来没有用过这个工具，我会怎么想？’”
Manchester Trading’s three hedge funds are relatively small by current standards. At the end of June, the funds’ collective value was about three hundred and fifty million dollars, of which about half belonged to Niederhoffer and Wisdom. In 2003 and 2004, the funds increased in value by more than forty per cent each year, and in 2005 the value of the largest fund, Matador, rose fifty-six per cent—a performance that earned Niederhoffer an industry award. Last year, his funds were flat. But in the first six months of 2007 they were up again, by between thirty and forty per cent.
用现在的标准来看，曼彻斯特交易公司现在管理的3个对冲基金就相对很小了。在6月底，基金的总价值是3.5亿美元，其中有一半是尼德霍夫和威斯顿的。2003年和2004年，基金每年增值40%以上，2005年，最大的基金斗牛士增值了56%——这个业绩让尼德霍夫拿到了行业内的奖项。去年他的基金没赚钱，但是2007年上半年又增值了，大约增值了30——40%。
Niederhoffer acknowledges that his aggressive investing style and his reliance on borrowed money increase the volatility of his returns and the likelihood that he will suffer a calamity. In May, 2006, Matador lost about thirty per cent of its value, and in February of this year it suffered another big fall. Many hedge funds claim that they can generate high returns with little risk. Niederhoffer tells friends who want to invest money with him that it is too risky. (Most of his clients are multimillionaires and financial institutions.) “The idea that you can make a lot of wealth in a steady, unspectacular fashion, with no great gyrations, is a canard,” he said to me. “If you are going to try and make forty or fifty per cent a year, tremendous variations are inevitable.”
尼德霍夫承认自己的投资风格很冒险，而且他自己喜欢借钱，这样就导致了他的回报不稳定，也有可能遇到灾难。2006年5月，斗牛士大约缩水30%，今年2月又有大缩水。很多对冲基金都说自己可以产生很高的回报，同时风险不大。尼德霍夫告诉像投资给他的朋友们说那太危险了。（他的大部分客户都是千万富翁和金融机构。）他告诉我：“不依靠投机的方法稳定赚大钱，且中间没有大幅的缩水，这个想法其实是谣传。如果你想每年赚40%或50%，很大的波动是不可避免的。”
At three o’clock, when Wisdom and I went back upstairs, Niederhoffer was outside playing tennis with one of his traders, Duncan Coker. Soon, however, he returned, sitting down at his desk in a T-shirt, tennis shorts, and sneakers, ignoring the no-shoes rule. “The market’s supposed to go up from three until the close,” he said. “Let’s see if it does.” While Wisdom and I were having lunch, the Dow had stabilized and Niederhoffer had sold some of the stock futures he had purchased earlier in the day. “The worst mistake in this business is to be in over your head,” he said. “I was long about seventy-five million dollars. In addition to that, I had my regular option position. So I took the opportunity to reduce my exposure.”
威斯顿很我3点钟回到楼上，尼德霍夫正在和他的一个交易者打网球，这个交易者叫邓肯·柯克。尼德霍夫很快又回到了他的办公桌，穿着T恤衫，网球衣和运动鞋，他忘了不穿鞋的规则。他说：“从3点钟开始，市场要涨，一直涨到收盘。让我们看看它是如何做到的。”我和威斯顿一起吃饭的时候道琼斯工业指数稳定了，尼德霍夫则卖出了一些他头一天买的股指期货。他说：“做交易最大的错误就是头昏。我大概做多了7500万美元，另外，我还有期权仓位。所以我要找机会减仓。”
In addition to speculating on short-term market movements, Niederhoffer frequently sells financial contracts, called “put options,” which, in the event of a steep fall in the market, would oblige him to pay out large sums of money. The buyers of these options are usually other investors seeking to hedge their positions, and in a sense Niederhoffer acts like an insurance company: in return for a premium—the price of the option—he agrees to bear the risk of a market crash. Often, this is a good business; but whenever the market enters a volatile period he is in peril. (“He is his own worst enemy,” Nassim Taleb, the author and derivatives trader, says of Niederhoffer. “One of the most brilliant men I have ever met, and he wastes his time selling options—something nobody can have any skill in—and it leaves him vulnerable to blowing up.”)
除了做短线，尼德霍夫还常常卖出金融合约，叫看跌期权。在如此下跌的市场，这么做需要支付很多资金。买入期权的投资者一般是为了对冲自己的仓位，似乎尼德霍夫就是一个保险公司：为了得到卖期权的收益——他愿意承受崩盘时的风险。很多时候，这是一笔好买卖，但是一旦市场进入振荡行情，他就惨了。（纳西姆·塔勒布是作家，也是交易者，他是这样评论尼德霍夫的：“他是他自己最大的敌人。他是我遇到的最出色的人之一，他总是浪费时间去卖出期权——每人懂期权——他这么做很容易破产。”）
As 4 P.M.—the close of trading—approached, the Dow was again down, by about a hundred and twenty points. Niederhoffer didn’t seem particularly discouraged, though. He thought that he discerned a LoBagola pattern. “It’s going to be very bullish for tomorrow,” he said. “It will be the first one-hundred-point drop in sixteen hundred points. I’m going to buy some more futures.”
下午收盘时间是4点钟，时间快到了，道琼斯又跌了，差不多跌了120点。尼德霍夫似乎没有气馁。他认为这是娄巴格拉模式，他说：“明天会大涨。已经跌了1600点，这100点是最后一跌，我明天要买点股指期货。”
Niederhoffer’s theories about market behavior date to his college years. In 1964, when he was a senior at Harvard, he wrote a thesis on stock-market patterns. At the time, the so-called “efficient market hypothesis,” which states that stock prices move randomly and therefore can’t be predicted, was coming into vogue. Niederhoffer, citing data on trading volumes and subsequent price movements, claimed to have found evidence that contradicted the random model. His argument didn’t fully convince his adviser, the economist Robert Dorfman, but it helped earn him admission to the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, where he enrolled in September, 1964.
尼德霍夫在读大学的时候就形成了自己的市场行为理论。1964年，他在哈佛读大四，他写了一篇关于市场模式的论文。当时，所谓的有效市场理论说股价是随机波动的，是无法被预测的，那时这个理论正在逐渐流行。尼德霍夫则说他利用成交量，价格波动等证据，能证明随机理论是有问题的。他的理论并没有让他的顾问经济学家罗伯特·多夫曼认同，但是却让他步入了芝加哥大学研究生院，他于1964年9月到该学院报道。
At Chicago, Niederhoffer wrote several research papers arguing that it was possible to detect predictable movements in the stock market. He uncovered evidence, for example, that the market tended to do worse on Mondays than on Fridays. Several members of the faculty had helped to develop the efficient market hypothesis, and Niederhoffer’s relationships with his professors were often contentious. At one seminar, he later recalled, “I criticized all those who had concluded that markets were random, including most of the professors in the room, as being too heavy-handed in their testing methods to uncover the structure of price variations. Further, I cautioned them that their failure to disprove a hypothesis that no structure existed was methodologically inadequate to support a conclusion that prices were random. When I put it in the vernacular, ‘You can’t prove a negative,’ pandemonium broke loose.”
尼德霍夫在芝加哥写了几篇调查报告说股市的波动是可能被预测的。比如说，他发现周一的市场比周五要糟糕。有些大学教授在帮忙发展有效市场理论，而尼德霍夫则常常和教授们吵架。他回忆说，在一次研讨会上：“我评论了所有支持随机市场的人，也评论了在场的教授们，他们的研究价格波动的方法是笨手笨脚的。另外，我警告他们，他们没有足够的证据证明价格是随机的。当我说‘你们无法举反证’时，现场就没人吵了。”
Niederhoffer was an early proponent of what is now called behavioral economics, and his unorthodox theories made him something of an academic celebrity. In 1969, he was hired at Berkeley as an assistant professor, and several hundred students signed up for his course on finance. Three years later, enrollment had dropped precipitately. “I wasn’t too good at it, frankly,” he told me. “I was not a very good teacher, and I had my own ideas about things. I was earning nine thousand dollars a year. I was playing squash, doing research, dabbling in business. It was all too much.”
尼德霍夫很早就捍卫行为经济学，他的反传统理论让他成为学校的名人。1969年，他被伯克利聘为助理教授，有几百个学生报名学金融。3年后，报名的人大减。他告诉我：“坦白说，我不行。我不是优秀的老师，我有自己的想法。我当时一年赚9000美元。我还要打网球，做研究，搞生意。我研究的东西太多了。”
Niederhoffer had also married—Gail Herman, a graduate of Bryn Mawr whom he met at the wedding of a Harvard friend, the economist Richard Zeckhauser. In the early seventies, Gail and Niederhoffer, who had decided to leave academe, moved to New York, where he started an investment-banking firm that sought out small, family-owned companies and helped sell them to bigger, public companies. The venture proved so successful that before long Niederhoffer and a partner, Dan Grossman, started buying and operating businesses themselves. Among the firms they acquired were American Almond, a Brooklyn company that provided almond paste to bakeries, and Tech Com Inc., a Florida defense contractor that built navigation equipment for planes and ships. “I would run the companies. Victor would visit them every two years or so, and cause havoc,” Grossman, a lawyer by training, recalled recently. “He’d say something like ‘What this company needs is sales. No more research, no more secretarial duties—I want you all out there selling things.’ Then he’d leave, and I’d say, ‘Don’t take any notice of what he said. That’s just Victor being Victor.’ ”
尼德霍夫在参加哈佛朋友经济学家理查德·济科豪瑟的婚礼时遇到了布林默尔大学的吉尔·赫尔曼，并和她结婚了。在70年代早期，吉尔和尼德霍夫决定离开学校，搬到纽约去，他们在纽约开了一家家庭公司，也就是投资银行公司，最后卖给了大公司。他们的创业很成功，不久尼德霍夫有了一个伙伴，丹·格罗斯曼，于是他们就自己做生意，买卖公司。他们收购的公司包括美国杏仁，这家布鲁克林的公司生产杏仁蛋糕；他们还收购了佛罗里达州的防卫承建商，这家公司专门为飞机和船舶制造导航设备。律师格罗斯曼前不久回忆说：“我当时管理这些公司。维克多则1，2年才来看一次，导致了一些麻烦。他说公司要做的事就是销售。不必做研究，不必搞行政——我希望你们全部出去卖产品。然后他走了，我就说‘不要理他。维克多就是那个样子。’”
By the late seventies, Niederhoffer and Gail had two daughters: Galt, who was named after Francis Galton, the Victorian polymath who helped to develop regression analysis and coined the term “eugenics”; and Katie. In 1981, Niederhoffer and Gail separated, and he began dating his assistant, Susan Cole, whom he married in 1991. They have four daughters: Rand, Victoria, Artemis, and Kira. The mother of Niederhoffer’s son, Aubrey, who is one and a half, is Laurel Kenner, a former editor at Bloomberg whom he met in 1999. “My personal life is more complicated than Rupert Murdoch’s,” Niederhoffer joked to me. (Murdoch has six children from three marriages.)
到了70年代末，尼德霍夫和吉尔有了2个女儿：一个叫高特，高特这个名字来自弗朗西斯·高尔顿，弗朗西斯是维多利亚时代的智者，他帮忙形成了回归分析，并创造了优生学这个名词。另一个女儿叫凯蒂。尼德霍夫和吉尔在1981年离婚，然后他开始和自己的秘书苏珊·科尔约会，他们于1991年结婚。他们有4个女儿：蓝蒂，维多利亚，阿特米斯和琦雅。尼德霍夫儿子的妈妈叫
Niederhoffer began investing seriously in the stock market when Galt and Katie were young. In 1979, using money he had saved, he started trading more or less full time and opened an office in midtown. “I got lucky,” he told me. “In eighteen months, I ran fifty thousand dollars up to twenty million dollars. I had an idea that there was going to be inflation, so I kept selling Treasury bonds and buying gold and silver. For a long time, it worked very well. Then one day I was playing racquetball in Staten Island with a guy who subsequently became the U.S. champion. After the first game, I called the office to see where the market was. The price of gold had fallen from eight hundred and fifty dollars to six hundred dollars in an hour. My net worth had gone down to ten million dollars.
在高特和凯蒂比较小的时候，尼德霍夫就开始很认真地投资于股市了。1979年，他用存款或多或少地全职交易，并在市中心开了一个办公室。他告诉我：“我很幸运。我在18个月内把5万美元增值到了2000万美元。我知道要发生通货膨胀，所以我总是卖出债券，并买入黄金和白银。结果一直很好。有一天，我和一个人在斯塔藤岛打壁球，后来这个人成为全国冠军了。打完第一局，我打电话给办公室，以了解市场状况。黄金的价格在1个小时内从850美元跌到了600美元。我的净值跌到了1000万美元。”
“That was where my Brighton Beach training came in,” Niederhoffer went on. “I’d seen a lot of gamblers die broke. My father used to say I’d end up on the Bowery, like the other gamblers. I’d say, ‘Dad, I’ve got a system.’ He’d say, ‘Baloney. Those guys on the Bowery had more statistics and systems than you’ve got.’ I took what he said seriously. I told my assistant, who later became my second wife, ‘If I ever lose more than half my stake, close out all my positions. Don’t let me trade anymore.’ I went back to my match. During the second game, she sold everything. By then, my ten million dollars had dwindled to five million, but at least I got out with that much.”
尼德霍夫继续说：“当时我要到布莱顿海边去培训，我看见很多赌徒破产了。我爸过去经常说我会像其他赌徒一样，生活在纽约的贫困区。我就说‘爸，我有一个系统。’他就说‘胡扯，贫困区的那些人有比你更好的统计数字和系统。’我不幸让他言中了。我告诉我的妻子，他就是我的第二个老婆‘如果我的本金亏掉了一半，你就要帮我全部平仓，不能再让我交易了。’结果我真的亏了一半。在我打第二局的时候，他帮我全部平仓了。结果1000万美元变成了500万美元，至少我还有那么多。”
Wall Street in the late seventies was much less technologically sophisticated than it is today. “If you could solve two equations in two unknowns, you were a high-tech person,” Paul DeRosa recalled. “Someone with Victor’s quantitative skills was a rare bird. In the early years, that gave him a big advantage.” In 1981, George Soros, who was by then a wealthy investor but who was having a bad year, heard about Niederhoffer’s reputed ability to predict short-term market movements and arranged to meet him at his office. Soros left the meeting impressed, and gave Niederhoffer some money to manage. The men shared an intellectual fascination with markets, and they became close, talking on the phone nearly every day, and playing tennis or chess several times a week. “My father had just passed away,” Niederhoffer recalled. “George was struggling. He needed a ledge to give him some purchase. I provided that.”
70年代末的华尔街不像现在那样使用技术。保罗·蒂柔沙回忆说：“如果你能解有2个未知数的2元方程式，那么你就是高手。像维克多一样懂技术的人很少。在早年，懂技术是很占优势的。”乔治·索罗斯在1981年很富有，但是那年的投资却不顺利，索罗斯听说尼德霍夫能预测市场短期的变化，他就约尼德霍夫到他的办公室会面。会后索罗斯印象深刻，给尼德霍夫一些资金让他管理。他们对市场一样着迷，所以他们很快就走近了，他们几乎每天通电话，每周打网球或下棋。尼德霍夫回忆说：“当时我爸刚去世。乔治则交易艰难。他需要一个帮手，正好我出现了。”
By the mid-eighties, Niederhoffer was managing many of Soros’s investments in bonds and commodities, which were worth hundreds of millions of dollars. On Tuesday, October 20, 1987, a day after the Dow dropped five hundred and eight points, Niederhoffer and Soros played tennis, as usual. Both men had lost a lot of money in the crash, and Niederhoffer had trouble concentrating; Soros, however, was calm. Don’t worry, he told Niederhoffer, the market will reopen tomorrow, and there will be plenty of opportunities to make back our losses.
到了80年代中期，尼德霍夫为索罗斯管理很多债券和商品，价值几亿美元。1987年10月20日周二，前一天道琼斯跌了508点，尼德霍夫和索罗斯像往常一样在打网球。在这次崩跌中，他们都亏了很多钱，尼德霍夫无法集中精力进行交易。索罗斯也不安心。索罗斯告诉尼德霍夫，市场还在，我们有无数机会把钱赚回来。
Over the next several years, Niederhoffer’s funds yielded an annual average return of about thirty per cent, which put them near the top of the industry. In 1994, Business Week named him the best commodities-fund manager in the country. A year later, he started two new hedge funds: Niederhoffer Investments and Niederhoffer International Markets. For a while, he hardly slept. During the day, he traded stocks and currencies in Europe and the United States, and at night he bought and sold Japanese yen. He also invested in emerging markets, making successful plays in Turkish bonds and Mexican stocks.
随后几年，尼德霍夫基金的收益是每年30%左右，让他成为行业的佼佼者。1994年，《商业周刊》说他是行业内最优秀的商品基金经理。1年后，他又启动了2个对冲基金：尼德霍夫投资和尼德霍夫国际市场。有一段时期，他连睡觉的时间都没有。他白天要交易欧洲和美国的股票和外汇，晚上要交易日元。他还投资于新兴市场，他在土耳其债券和墨西哥股票都取得了成功。
Toward the end of 1996, another profitable year for him, Niederhoffer decided that he wanted to invest in Southeast Asia, which was widely seen as a growing market. He dispatched an old friend, Steven (Bo) Keeley, to the region. Keeley, a veterinarian who spent six months of the year living in the California desert without a telephone or electric power, had trekked in dozens of countries. On one trip, while paddling down the Amazon, he had contracted malaria, briefly gone blind, and been comatose for a week. Keeley believed that assessing a developing country’s economic prospects involved not only meeting with the C.E.O.s of leading companies but studying the lengths of discarded cigarettes—the theory being that the wealthier people are, the longer their butts—and the state of the brothels. After a couple of months in Asia, he reported to Niederhoffer that the brothels in Bangkok had recently become much cleaner and safer, and that Thailand was an excellent place to invest. During the previous decade, the Thai economy had grown at an annual rate of almost ten per cent; its interest rates were among the lowest of any country in the region; and its stocks were cheap because they had fallen sharply earlier in the year. In the spring of 1997, Niederhoffer invested several hundred million dollars in Thailand. Instead of buying stocks in some of the country’s biggest companies, he entered into complicated deals with Wall Street firms to buy futures contracts that were tied to the value of Thai stocks. The margin requirements for futures purchases are much lower than those for stock purchases, so he was able to put up a relatively modest amount of cash, while using borrowed money to accumulate substantial holdings.
到了1986年底，这一年他也赚了很多钱，尼德霍夫决定投资于南亚，当时南亚市场正在兴起。他派遣自己的老朋友史蒂文·波·凯利去南亚。凯利是兽医，他曾经在加州沙漠待过半年，没有电话，没有电，他去过很多国家。有一次在亚马逊，他得了痢疾，差点瞎了，昏迷了一周。凯利认为要评估一个发展中的国家，不但要和大公司的首席执行官了解情况，还要研究他们的服务行业——理论上人越富，越喜欢享受——妓院越发达。在亚洲待了几个月后，他向尼德霍夫报告说，曼谷的妓院越来越干净，越来越安全，泰国是投资的好地方。过去几十年来，泰国的经济成长率是每年10%，利息是南亚最低的，股市则跌到了很便宜地步。1997年春天，尼德霍夫向泰国投资了几亿美元。他像华尔街的公司一样，没有投资于股票，而是买了股指期货。由于股指期货有杠杆效应，他还借了钱，买了很多的股指期货。
His timing was atrocious. In May and June, a wave of selling swept through the Asian financial markets, and Thailand was especially hard hit. Many overseas investors tried to repatriate their money, and the Thai government started to run out of foreign-exchange reserves. On July 2nd, it was forced to abandon what amounted to a fixed exchange rate between the baht and the dollar, which had been in place for more than a decade. The Thai currency collapsed, and so did the stock market. The value of many of Niederhoffer’s Thai holdings dropped by more than ninety per cent. His lenders demanded that he put up more collateral. In order to meet their demands, he was forced to sell many of his profitable investments, which left his funds severely depleted. “We were like someone who is immune-deficient,” Steve Wisdom recalled. “We had lost so much money that we had no resistance left to other maladies.”
他的时机太糟糕了。到了5，6月，亚洲金融市场出现了卖盘，泰国跌的最厉害。很多海外投资者都在拼命撤资，而泰国政府已经没有外汇储备了。7月2日，泰国政府只好放弃泰铢和美元之间长达几十年的固定汇率。于是泰铢就贬值了，股市也崩盘了。尼德霍夫的仓位亏了90%以上。他的投资者要求他分散投资，为了满足投资者的要求，他就被迫把赚钱的投资卖了，这样他的基金就虚空了。史蒂夫·威斯顿回忆说：“我们就像是免疫力低下的人，我们亏了很多钱，无法抵挡其它疾病了。”
Apart from his Thai holdings, Niederhoffer’s most substantial investments were in the American futures markets. At first, the U.S. market weathered the Asian crisis pretty well, but in the fall of 1997 it became more volatile. On October 27, 1997, the Dow fell by more than five hundred points, and, for the first time in recent history, the market closed early. Amid widespread panic, Niederhoffer fielded calls from lenders. Some, including Refco, a large commodities broker, demanded that he give them more money to support his options positions. Niederhoffer was unable to come up with the cash, and the next morning Refco liquidated his portfolio.
除了在泰国的投资，尼德霍夫大部分投资是美国期货市场。一开始，亚洲金融危机的时候，美国市场还没事，但是到了1997年，美国市场也开始波动了。1997年10月27日，道琼斯跌了500多点，结果市场有史以来第一次提前收盘。恐慌快速传播，尼德霍夫无法满足投资者的撤资要求。其中一个大经纪公司瑞富要求尼德霍夫追加资金以维护他的期权仓位。尼德霍夫没有足够的资金，瑞富第二天上午就把他的仓位平掉了。
“It was a very poor decision on my part to invest in Thailand,” Niederhoffer told me. “I had no scientific basis for investing there. In the U.S. market, there is evidence that it is a good time to invest after a big fall. In Thailand, there was no such statistical evidence. It was purely a qualitative idea. I’d seen Soros do that a lot of times and make a lot of money, but it didn’t work for me. Previously, I had had two or three qualitative ideas that made money—Turkish bonds, Mexican stocks—and it lured me into a false sense of security.”
尼德霍夫告诉我：“投资泰国的决定是错误的。我没有投资泰国的科学依据。对于美国市场，有充分的理由在大跌后投资。对于泰国，没有统计数据证明这点。定性不同。我只知道索罗斯投资了很多次，赚了很多钱，但是他的方法我用就不行。之前，我在土耳其债券和墨西哥股市赚了钱，我就以为投资泰国也是安全的。”
We were sitting on a bench outside a building in the East Fifties, where Laurel Kenner lives and Niederhoffer stays when he visits. He was drinking a bottle of organic lemonade. I asked him whether hubris had contributed to his downfall. “Yeah, I’d say,” he replied. “In those days, we always wanted to be No. 1 in the ratings. There was a Canadian firm, Friedberg—they were having a good year, and we wanted to keep up with them. It was always nip and tuck between us and them.” Niederhoffer was silent for a moment. Then he spoke quickly: “You asked for reasons—I could name another ten. We had no stops. We picked the wrong country to invest in. We were too illiquid. We had too big a percentage of the market, and we didn’t have the ability to get out of our positions. We were too financially vulnerable to the brokers. I didn’t take account of the fact that I could be squeezed and that customers could withdraw their money. But mainly I didn’t have a proper foundation for my investment there. I had no knowledge of the country. I’d never even visited the country. All I had done was finance a trip by Bo Keeley to the brothels there.’’
尼德霍夫去东50街劳雷尔·肯特的家里访问，我们一起坐在外面的椅子上。他喝柠檬的时候，我就问他是不是傲慢导致了他的亏损。他回答说：“是的。我过去总是想成为第一。当时的加拿大公司叫弗莱德博格，他们当年做的不错，我们想和他们一样。我们和他们总是旗鼓相当。”尼德霍夫沉默了一会儿，然后他很快地说：“你问我原因——我能再找到10个理由。我们没有止损。我们投资错了国家。我们没有流动资金了。我们在单一市场的仓位太大了。我们没有能力及时平仓。我们无法追加资金给经纪公司。我没有看清事实，没想到客户会撤资。但主要原因是我没有合适的投资基础。我对其它国家不了解。我甚至没有去研究过那个国家。我只是和凯利去了一次妓院。”
After his funds folded, Niederhoffer fell into a deep depression. His eldest daughter, Galt, a film producer and novelist who is thirty-one and lives in Manhattan, recalls coaxing him to Long Island for a walk on a beach, where he knelt on the sand like a zombie. “It wasn’t just depression,” she said. “It was self-hatred and hopelessness. He felt like he had let people down. It was so shameful. This was a guy who grew up in a modest house, the son of a cop. Imagine what it would be like to create all of those things for your family and then to lose them.”
基金倒闭以后，尼德霍夫极度压抑。他的大女儿高特是电影制片人和小说家，31岁，住在曼哈顿，她陪着他爸在长岛散步，并安慰他，但是她爸却呆呆地跪在地上，她说：“他不仅仅是压抑，他是悔恨，无助。他觉得自己害了别人。他很羞愧。他是警察的儿子，他出身好。想象一下吧，你为家人创造了一切，然后又失去了一切。”
Niederhoffer had managed to retain some of his assets. He mortgaged his house in Connecticut and sold a collection of trophy and presentation silver and some of his rare books, which enabled him to pay off his creditors. He used this period of enforced inactivity to reconsider his approach to investing and to retool his pattern-recognition software. After about six months, using several hundred thousand dollars of his own money, he started trading again. “I had no brokerage account—no broker would do business with me under ordinary terms,” he said. “No customers would open a new account with me.” In 1999 and 2000 he did well, and in 2002 he started Matador, an offshore hedge fund. Its biggest investor was Octane, a hedge fund based in Switzerland, whose chief investment officer, Mustafa Zaidi, is an old friend of Niederhoffer’s.
尼德霍夫尽力保留了一些资金。他把康涅狄格州的房子抵押贷款，变卖了一些银质奖章，变卖了一些好书，这样就可以还债了。他利用这段时间重新思考自己的投资方法并重新改造自己的模式识别软件。大约半年后，他用自己的几十万美元又开始了交易。他说：“我没有经纪账户——经济公司一般不愿意和我合作。没有新客户投资给我。”他在1999年和2000年做的很好，并于2002年创办了斗牛士基金，这是一个海外对冲基金。他的最大的投资者是瑞士的对冲基金辛烷，辛烷的首席投资官穆斯塔法·柴迪是尼德霍夫的老朋友。
At the beginning, Matador had less than ten million dollars to invest. In its second year, the fund had a return of forty-one per cent, and Niederhoffer’s renewed success helped him attract more money, including some from former clients who had lost their investments in 1997. (For these investors, he waived the hefty fees that hedge funds normally charge.) Eventually, he had enough cash to open two more funds. In February, 2003, Niederhoffer published “Practical Speculation,” a manual for serious investors, which he co-wrote with Laurel Kenner, whom he had been dating for several years. That year, he separated from his wife, Susan, and in 2004 he and Kenner launched DailySpeculations.com, which they dedicated to “the scientific method, free markets, deflating ballyhoo, creating value, and laughter.
一开始，斗牛士的资金不到1000万美元。第二年，这个基金的回报是41%，尼德霍夫的再次成功让他吸引了很多的资金，包括1997年遭受亏损的客户。（对于这些投资者，他不再收昂贵的手续费。）最后，他的资金够多，他又创建了2个基金。2003年2月，尼德霍夫出版了《投机实战》，这本为认真投资者写的书是和劳雷尔·肯特合著的，他们约会了好几年。当年，他和苏珊离婚了，然后他在2004年和肯特创办了dailyspeculations.com，他们在这个网站谈论科学的方法，自由的市场，不吹牛，创造价值和笑声。
The Web site has since evolved into an informal social-networking site for speculators and aspiring speculators. “I met a lot of my friends through the site,” James Lackey, the trader who once worked with Niederhoffer and who posts regularly on the site, said. “Victor is like the hub where the wheels of speculation turn. He’s the center of so many of our relationships—we call him the Chairman. He’s the guy who keeps everyone in line.”
这个网站后来成为投机者交流的场所。詹姆斯·拉基是一个交易者，曾经和尼德霍夫共事过，他经常在网站发帖，他说：“维克多像车轴一样，投机的车轮在滚动着。他是我们友谊的中信——我们称他为主席。他让每个人各就各位。”
In April, 2006, Niederhoffer attended a dinner at the St. Regis Hotel, where MARHedge, a company that published a newsletter for the hedge-fund industry, presented him with an award as the top manager in the commodity-fund category. “What I’m proudest of is that we’ve made several hundred million dollars after fees,” Niederhoffer said to me in July. “We’ve returned a lot more money to our investors than they have invested.”
2006年4月，尼德霍夫到圣里吉斯酒店参加一次宴会，一个叫三月对冲的公司为对冲基金业出版了一份报告，并为尼德霍夫颁发奖章，认为他是商品基金的顶尖经理。尼德霍夫在7月告诉我：“我最骄傲的就是净赚了几个亿。我们给投资者的回报很多。”
As Niederhoffer and his funds prospered, it appeared to many of his old friends and colleagues that he had finally become a master speculator. “It is impossible to go through what Victor went through without it altering what you do,” Paul DeRosa told me in July. “It made him more conscious of risk, more attuned to it. It was an expensive education, but the important thing is that it wasn’t wasted.” Irving Redel, a former gold and silver trader and chairman of the New York Commodities Exchange, who was a mentor to Niederhoffer in his Wall Street days, said, “To be a great trader you need discipline. You have to have certain strategies that you follow, but you also have to have the flexibility to know when it is going wrong. And you have to know to never go beyond what you can afford to lose.” I asked Redel whether Niederhoffer has these qualities. He replied, “He does now.”
当尼德霍夫和他的基金兴起时，他的朋友和同事都觉得他是投机大师。保罗·蒂柔沙在7月告诉我：“只有经历维克多经历的事才能成长。这样他就更担心风险，更适应风险。这是昂贵的教训，但重要的这不是浪费。”欧文·拉德尔是黄金白银交易者，也是纽约商品交易所的主席，他也是尼德霍夫的导师，他说：“要想成为优秀的交易者，你必须要有纪律。你必须有一定的策略，你还要足够灵活，在犯错的时候知道自己错了。你还必须知道度在哪里，做事不能过度。你要知道你只能亏多少。”我就问拉德尔是否尼德霍夫具备了这些特质，他回答：“他现在有了。”
On the first Thursday of every month, Niederhoffer hosts a meeting of libertarians at the General Society of Mechanics and Tradesmen, on West Forty-fourth Street. One Thursday evening in early June, about seventy people were gathered in the society’s library, listening to an elderly woman in a white hat, who stood at a lectern talking enthusiastically about Christopher Hitchens’s book “God Is Not Great.” A middle-aged man with a beard spoke next, urging the others to accompany him on a walking tour he hosted called Ayn Rand’s New York, in which he visited local buildings where Rand had lived and held objectivist salons, as well as sites—the Waldorf-Astoria, Grand Central Terminal—that served as inspirations for places in her novel “Atlas Shrugged.”
每个月的第一个周四，尼德霍夫就在西44街技工和商人协会为自由人士搞聚会。6月初的一个周四晚上，大约有70人聚在协会的图书馆，听一个戴白帽的老年妇女站在那里激动地讲克里斯托弗·希坎斯的书《上帝并不伟大》。然后是一个有胡须的中年男人呼吁大家一起去参观艾因·兰德的纽约，他们参观了兰德的住处和兰德主持的沙龙，还有沃尔托夫啊斯托里亚，这是一个很大的酒店，就是在这个地方她写出了著名的《地球颤栗》。
The meetings are open to the public, and Niederhoffer, who was sitting on a table at the back of the room, swinging his legs, encourages each person to speak. He calls these sessions the New York City Junto, after the discussion group that Benjamin Franklin founded in Philadelphia in 1727, which held meetings for thirty years and eventually became the American Philosophical Society. Niederhoffer’s Junto is more casual, but he takes libertarianism seriously, considering it to be a natural complement to speculating. As a statement on his Web site puts it, “Victor Niederhoffer believes the purpose of life is the pursuit of happiness and achievement, and that the voluntary transactions that flow naturally out of an enterprise system are the key to material and personal freedom, and peace.” In an op-ed article that he published in the Wall Street Journal in 1989, he argued that speculators serve several important economic functions. When a good becomes scarce, he said, speculators bid up prices, which encourages firms to produce more and consumers to buy less, and helps to restore balance to the market. “I am proud to be a speculator,” Niederhoffer wrote. “I am proud that my humble attempts to predict Tuesday’s prices on Monday are an indispensable component of our society. By buying low and selling high, I create harmony and freedom.”
这个聚会是公开的，尼德霍夫坐在后面的桌子上，晃着腿，鼓励其他人去演讲。他说这些聚会就是纽约的秘密聚会，这是仿照本杰明·富兰克林1727年在费城搞的研讨会，这个聚会搞了30年，后来成为美国哲学会。尼德霍夫的秘密聚会比较普通，但是他很关注自由，他认为投机是自然的。他在网站上说：“维克多·尼德霍夫认为生活的目标就是追求幸福和成就，办公司就是为了实现个人的自由和平静。”他在1989年《华尔街日报》的一篇文章说投机者扮演着几个重要的经济角色。他说，一旦货物稀缺，投机者就报高价，这样就鼓励公司多生产产品，客户少买产品，这样市场就平衡了。尼德霍夫写道：“我是投机者，我感到骄傲。我相信我预测价格本身就是社会不可缺少的一部分。我低买高卖，创造了和谐和自由。”
The guest speaker at the meeting was Thomas DiLorenzo, an economics professor at Loyola College, in Maryland, and the author of fourteen books, including “How Capitalism Saved America: The Untold History of Our Country from the Pilgrims to the Present.” DiLorenzo’s subject was the filmmaker and liberal gadfly Michael Moore. Not having seen Moore’s latest movie, “Sicko,” DiLorenzo was at something of a disadvantage, but he expressed outrage at Moore’s failure, in his previous films, to recognize the importance of competition, the virtues of sweatshops, and the depredations of socialism. At one point, Niederhoffer interrupted him and asked, “What are the general principles?” DiLorenzo replied, “Markets work and government-run monopolies don’t.”
聚会的嘉宾是托马斯·蒂洛伦佐，他是马里兰州圣徒学院的经济学教授，他出版了14本书，包括《资本主义如何拯救了美国：我国从清教徒到现在的未知历史》。蒂洛伦佐谈到了制片人和自由牛虻迈克尔·摩尔。蒂洛伦佐没有看过摩尔最新的电影《医疗内幕》，蒂洛伦佐也不占优势，但是他说摩尔的电影是失败的，他说竞争是重要的，血汗工厂有好处，社会主义是有破坏性的。尼德霍夫有时会打断他，问他：“你的主要原则是什么？”蒂洛伦佐回答说：“反对政府垄断。”
At least one member of the audience, a gray-haired man, seemed to think that this was going a bit too far. He cited the Federal Home Loan Banks, an agency that makes mortgages more readily available, and the National Park Service. Don’t you agree that the government does some things well? the man asked. “No,” DiLorenzo replied. “The government has screwed up the national parks. I think capitalism would do a much better job with land.”
最后一个灰头发的男人认为这个话题扯远了。他提到了联邦家庭贷款银行和国家公园局，前者提供稳定的抵押贷款。这个人问道：难道你不承认政府做了一些好事？蒂洛伦佐回答：“不，政府毁了国家公园局。我认为资本主义可以更好地处理好工作问题和土地问题。”
Shortly after ten o’clock, Niederhoffer ended the meeting. I was eager to speak to him about the stock market, which had fallen by almost two hundred points that day. “I can’t talk about it,” he said when I approached him. “It’s too painful. I might be able to review it in a few days.” He walked across the room to greet Kenner and Aubrey. He put his son on his shoulders and disappeared onto Forty-fourth Street.
刚过10点，尼德霍夫宣布会议结束。我急着和他谈股市，当天股市几乎跌了200点。当我找他的时候，他说：“我不想谈这个。太痛苦了。我准备好好反省一下。”他走过去和肯特和奥布里打招呼。他把儿子架在肩膀上然后消失在44街。
On May 3, 2006, the day that Aubrey was born, Niederhoffer’s wife, Susan, filed for divorce. As his spouse and the legal owner of many of his assets, which he had transferred to her in 1997, she had claim to much of his fortune. For months, the couple’s lawyers argued. Then, in February, Niederhoffer persuaded Susan to drop the divorce proceedings. In return, he agreed to leave Kenner at the end of 2007 and return to her. Then he informed Kenner of the plan.
2006年5月3日是奥布里的生日，也就是这天苏珊提出离婚。由于他们是合法夫妻，所以在离婚时，她分到了大部分的财富。他们的律师吵了几个月。然后在2月，尼德霍夫劝苏珊放弃离婚。作为回报，他同意在2007年底和肯特分手。然后他把这件事告诉了肯特。
For now, Niederhoffer shuttles between the women. From Sunday to Tuesday, he and Susan share the house in Connecticut. (Three of their four daughters have left home; the youngest, Kira, attends boarding school.) He spends the rest of the week in Manhattan, with Kenner and Aubrey. “He’s emotionally involved with both of those women right now,” Galt said to me. “He never really leaves women. Wives become extended-family members, like in-laws, or honorary members of the harem. They tolerate it because he’s a flawed genius and a man. They take the good with the bad. It’s all I’ve ever known. All I’ve ever known is we are weird.”
目前，尼德霍夫还在女人间来回奔波。从周六到周二，他和苏珊住在康涅狄格州的家里。（4个女儿中有3个女儿已经不在家里住了，最小的女儿叫吉雅，还在读书。）剩下来的时间则到曼哈顿和肯特及奥布里一起住。高特告诉我：“他同时爱上了2个女人。他没有离开她们。这2个老婆像一家人一样，就像伊斯兰国家一样和谐。她们忍受他，是因为他是有缺点的天才。她们把坏事当做好事。据我所知，我们太奇怪了。”
I was having lunch with Galt at a French restaurant near her apartment in Chelsea. Although Aubrey’s birth had been a shock to the family, she went on, her father sees his other children regularly, and he is on good terms with his first wife, Gail—Galt’s mother—who divides her time between New York and Texas. “We’ve become kind of like this very functional dysfunctional family,” Galt said. “To most people, it is completely abnormal, and yet we’ve come to have this somewhat wholesome, happy dynamic. All of the girls are close. My mother and Susan have grown very close.” Recently, Galt added, she, Gail, Susan, and all her sisters except Artemis, who was away, got together to celebrate the third birthday of her daughter, Magnolia. Laurel was not at the party. “Laurel is another story,” Galt said. “Susan and Laurel are not close. There’s nothing happy about that.”
我们在高特切尔西区公寓附近的法国餐馆吃饭。虽然奥布里的出生对她们家是一个震惊，她还要继续生活下去，她的爸爸会定期看望孩子们，他对第一个妻子吉尔有诚信的——也就是高特的妈妈——高特的妈妈在纽约和特克萨斯之间奔波。高特说：“”我们对这种奇怪的家庭有点适应了。对于大部分人来说，这不正常。但是我们还是比较高兴的。所有的女孩都很亲近。我妈和苏珊的关系也不错。高特补充说，最近除了远在外地的阿特米斯，她，吉尔，苏珊以及所有的姐妹都一起去庆祝她女儿木兰的生日。但劳雷尔没有来。高特说：“劳雷尔情况不同，苏珊和劳雷尔关系不好。”
Last year, Galt published a novel, “A Taxonomy of Barnacles,” which she described to me as “an effort to exorcise my demons about living in a family that was different from everybody else’s.” The novel features an eccentric and domineering businessman who has six daughters and desperately wants a male heir. Eventually, he acquires one in surprising circumstances. Shortly after the book came out, Niederhoffer took Galt to lunch at the Four Seasons and told her that her book had been prescient. “Oh, my God, you have a love child!” Galt blurted out. “No,” Niederhoffer said. “I have a son.” A few months later, Aubrey was born.
去年，高特出版了一部小说《不同的人》，她告诉我“努力去除住在一个每个人都持不同看法的家庭的怪怪的感觉。”这个小说说一个古怪的，强势的生意人有6个女儿，但是又死想要个儿子来继承他。最终，他在一个奇怪的场合下得到了一个儿子。小说出版后不久，尼德霍夫就带高特去四季酒店吃饭，并告诉她他知道她会写这样的书。高特立刻说：“哦，上帝，你有可爱的孩子！”尼德霍夫说：“不，我有一个儿子。”几个月后，奥布里就出世了。
Kenner, who is fifty-three, told me that she is unhappy about Niederhoffer’s arrangement with her. “Obviously, there is a lot of anger there,” she said. “But it is not just me. There is a baby involved.” I expressed surprise that her relationship with Niederhoffer remained cordial. “We had eight great years,” she replied. “He gave me so much. I am immeasurably better off on so many levels through meeting Victor. He was the best lover I ever had—not just in sexual terms. We wrote a book together. He is a great, romantic, gentle person.”
肯特现在53岁，她告诉我她对尼德霍夫对她的态度不满。她说：“很明显，我很生气。不仅仅是我感到生气。还要涉及到一个小孩。”我则为她和尼德霍夫的关系还保持兴奋状态而感到奇怪。她回答：“我们有8年时间过的很好。他给了我很多。我和维克多在一起很开心。他是我最好的爱人——不仅仅指性。我们在一起写了一本书。他很伟大，很浪漫，也很绅士。”
Niederhoffer declined to discuss his relationship with Susan. As for Kenner, he said, “We’ve had a very fine collaboration and had much pleasure and happiness together, and we have a wonderful son. We’re parents, and we still have mutual respect and admiration for each other.” He went on, “We didn’t have in mind the ultimate outcome, but we created a fantastic legacy—the baby, the books, and the articles.”
尼德霍夫则不愿意谈论苏珊。对于肯特，他说：“我们在一起合作的很好，也很快乐，幸福。我们有一个好儿子。我们是父母，我们互相尊重，互相尊敬。”他继续说：“我们没去想最终结果，但我们创造了伟大的传奇——小孩，书和文章。”
On Tuesday, July 17th, the Dow rose above fourteen thousand for the first time. The economy was growing, the long-term interest rate had dropped back to five per cent, and the volatile trading days of early summer seemed largely to have been forgotten. After the market closed, however, Bear Stearns announced that two of its hedge funds, which had investments in securities tied to subprime mortgages, had lost almost all their value. Problems in the subprime market spilled into money markets that banks and other financial institutions rely on to finance their daily activities; several more hedge funds went under; and commentators began to speak of a looming “credit crunch.” Stock markets around the world experienced wild fluctuations.
7月17日周二，道琼斯第一次涨到14000点以上。经济在成长，长期利息跌到了5%，人们似乎忘了夏初的市场波动。然而，收盘后，贝尔斯登宣布他们的2个对冲基金，由于之前投资了次级债市场，现在已经几乎亏光了。次级债市场的问题导致金融业和银行业都出现了问题，很多基金亏损了，评论家则提到了信贷紧缩。全世界的股市都在严重波动。
On Tuesday, July 24th, the Dow fell two hundred and twenty-six points. Two days later, it dropped three hundred and eleven points. Commentators on CNBC were making ominous pronouncements. I sent Niederhoffer an e-mail, saying that I hoped he had been well positioned for the market’s correction. He replied in three words: “I was not.” On Friday, July 27th, the Dow fell another two hundred points, closing four per cent down for the week. The markets were still volatile a week later, when Niederhoffer came into Manhattan for his monthly libertarian meeting. After it ended, we went across the street to a restaurant, where he ordered a cappuccino. He looked pale and haggard, and years older. For several minutes, we sat in silence. Then, in a low voice, he said, “Things have changed totally since we last spoke. The situation is fundamentally different. It is critical.” Kenner and Aubrey joined us, but Niederhoffer hardly seemed to notice them. “We are fighting for survival night and day,” he said when I pressed him for details. “I was caught wrong-footed in the market turbulence. I’m not as smart as I thought I was.”
7月24日周二，道琼斯跌了226点。2天后，它跌了311点。美国全国广播公司财经频道的评论家发出了悲观言论。我给尼德霍夫发了一封电子邮件，我希望他已经准备好了市场的修正动作。他用3个字回复：“我没有。”7月27日周五，道琼斯又跌了200点，当周的收盘价跌了4%。一周后，市场还在波动，尼德霍夫则到曼哈顿参加自由党的例行每月聚会。聚会结束后，他到街对面的餐馆点了一份卡布奇诺。他看起来脸色苍白，形容枯槁，似乎老了几岁。他呆坐了好几分钟。然后他低声说：“自从我上次发言以后，事情发生了重大变化。基本面已经变了，这太关键了。”肯特和奥布里也在一旁，但他似乎没有注意到她们的存在。当我问他具体情况时，他说：“我们现在是为生存而战。我又被套了。我没有自己想象的那么聪明。”
The previous week, the Chicago Mercantile Exchange, in response to the turmoil in the market, had raised its margin requirements on futures traders, a move that was potentially devastating for Niederhoffer, who had hundreds of millions of dollars in options. He had more money in reserve than he had had in 1997, but he was worried. “It’s a matter of redeploying resources,” he said. “Also, in trying to be courageous in response to the crisis, I put up a lot of my own capital. You remember the story of the Essex and Captain Pollard? We are like a tiny fishing boat off the coast of Alaska that has been caught in the biggest waves in a hundred years.”
上周，市场波动剧烈，面对如此情况，芝加哥商业交易所对期货交易者提高了保证金比例，这个举动对尼德霍夫来说是灾难性的，因为他持有几亿美元的期权。虽然他的准备金比1997年多，但是他还是担心。他说：“现在要重新组合资源。我有勇气面对危机，我自己也投资了很多。你还记得艾塞克斯号的船长波拉德吗？我们就像是一艘小渔船被困在了阿拉斯加几百年来的最大波浪中。”
Talking about his predicament seemed to improve Niederhoffer’s mood a little. He ate some sorbet and played with Aubrey. Then he said, “Now I have to go home and work.” Kenner got up to leave, straightening her dress and inadvertently exposing a thigh. “Do that again,” Niederhoffer commanded. “Do what?” Kenner asked. “Lift it up,” he said. “It can keep a man afloat.” They both laughed.
谈论他的困境，似乎能让尼德霍夫的情绪好点。他喝了一点果汁饮料，和奥布里玩了一会儿。然后他说：“我要回家去研究了。”肯特起身，准备离开，拉了一下衣服，不小心露出了大腿。尼德霍夫大喝：“你又这样。”肯特问：“又什么？”他说：“把衣服拉太高了，这样会让男人心神不宁的。”他们2个都笑了。
During the next two weeks, I tried repeatedly to talk to Niederhoffer. Part of the reason for his reticence was that he feared a leak. Hedge funds depend on access to borrowed money. If lenders learn that a fund is in trouble, they might decide to stop giving it money—which can have disastrous consequences for the fund. On July 30th, Sowood Capital Management, a Boston-based fund, announced that the assets under its management had lost more than fifty per cent of their value in a few weeks, and the fund closed shortly afterward. By mid-August, two funds operated by Goldman Sachs had lost about a third of the value they’d had at the beginning of the year. Goldman decided to invest two billion dollars of its own money in one of the funds, Global Equity Opportunities, and it persuaded several wealthy investors to put up another billion dollars on favorable terms.
之后2周，我尝试再次和尼德霍夫通话。结果他表示沉默，也许是害怕泄漏什么。对冲基金的钱是借来的。如果投资者知道这个基金有麻烦了，他们也许会撤资——这样基金就会出现灾难。7月30日，波士顿的基金索无德资金管理宣布在最近几周亏损了50%以上，然后这个基金很快就倒闭了。到了8月中旬，高盛管理的2个基金和年初相比大约亏损了33%。高盛决定自己再投资20亿美元给其中一个基金“全球资金机会”，同时还在劝说几个富有的投资者再追加10亿美元，他们给出了比较好的条件。
The spectacle of one of Wall Street’s most profitable firms being forced to shore up one of its flagship funds suggested some of the pressures that Niederhoffer was confronting. In today’s interconnected financial markets, there is no such thing as an isolated incident. When a dramatic event occurs in one sector, the effects are felt in others. The Goldman funds were computer-driven funds, and their software programs had failed to predict the size and speed of movements in the stock market. Prices had got “way out of whack,” David Viniar, Goldman’s chief financial officer, complained. “We were seeing things that were twenty-five standard-deviation moves several days in a row.”
华尔街最赚钱的公司被迫支撑自己的旗舰基金，这说明尼德霍夫也遇到了压力。在如今高度关联的金融市场，事件都是相关的，没有例外。只要有一个地方发生了灾难，其它地方就会受影响。高盛基金是用电脑投资的基金，他们的电脑没有预测到股市波动的大小和速度。高盛的首席金融官大卫·维尼亚抱怨说：“价格不对头啊，价格在连续几天内出现了25个标准背离值的波动。”
Like Niederhoffer’s funds, the Goldman funds were heavily leveraged. For every hundred dollars of capital that the Global Equity Opportunities fund owned, it had borrowed about six hundred dollars. When a fund is leveraged six to one, a five-per-cent fall in the value of its portfolio becomes a thirty-per-cent loss in capital. “Leverage is a double-edged sword,” Richard Bernstein, an analyst at Merrill Lynch, wrote in a note to clients a few days before Goldman announced its efforts to prop up the Global Opportunities fund. “It enhances returns on the upside, but also makes underperformance more rapid and severe.”
像尼德霍夫的基金一样，高盛基金也是高杠杆。对于“全球资金机会”基金，其中100美元就意味着它还借了大约600美元。如果基金的杠杆是6比1，只要标的资产的价格跌5%，这个基金整体就会亏30%。美林的分析师理查德·伯恩斯坦在高盛宣布“全球资金机会”基金亏损的前几天给客户的报告上面写着：“杠杆是双刃剑，它能提高回报，但是也加强了负面效果。”
Of course, Niederhoffer was aware of these dangers. But, between the middle of 2003 and the start of this year, the financial markets had been mostly calm. Stock prices had gone up, and, atypically, they had done so in a fairly straight line, with only two significant reversals, in May, 2006, and in February, 2007. From Niederhoffer’s perspective, the decline in market volatility was a welcome development, because it made his options trading much less risky. With prices steady or rising, he was less likely to be caught on the wrong end of a big market move. As the quiet times continued, many investors were lulled into believing that a less volatile era had begun. Alan Greenspan, who was the chairman of the Fed until February, 2006, helped to feed this illusion by talking about how financial innovations, such as the development of asset-backed securities, had spread risks more widely, making the market less vulnerable to shocks.
当然了，尼德霍夫意识到了这些危险。但是，从2003年年中到今年初，金融市场基本上是平静的。股价涨了，但它们几乎是直接上涨，只是在2006年5月和2007年2月出现了2次明显的回调。尼德霍夫喜欢市场的回调，因为这样期权的风险就不大。只要市场稳定或上涨，他就不会错过大行情。如果市场继续平静，很多投资者就以为市场不会再大起大落了。阿兰·格林斯潘在2006年2月前是美联储的主席，他大谈金融改革，比如有资产保证的证券大大地分散了风险，市场可以承受冲击，这些都是假象。
The crisis in the subprime-mortgage market changed all this. In the stock market, volatility was more pronounced than it had been for years. Even on days when the Dow closed just a few points down, prices lurched around. On Friday, August 10th, the Dow fell more than two hundred points before recovering at the close. On Thursday, August 16th, it fell almost three hundred and fifty points before closing down just fourteen points. A measure of market turbulence which many traders watch closely is the Chicago Board Options Exchange Volatility Index, known as the VIX. Between January, 2003, and January, 2007, the VIX fell from more than thirty to about ten. By the end of July, it had surged above twenty, and on August 16th, the day before the Fed cut the discount rate, it hit thirty-seven.
次贷危机改变了一切。股市的振荡更加剧烈。即使收盘价道琼是只跌了几点，价格也是又蹦又跳。8月10日周五，道琼斯在收盘前跌了200多点。8月16日周四，它差不多跌了350点，收盘时只跌了14点。很多交易者用芝加哥期权交易所波动指数VIX来衡量市场的波动性。2003年1月到2007年1月，VIX从30多跌到了10左右。到了7月底，它涨到了20，8月16日，在美联储降息之前，它达到了37。
The surge in volatility prompted the Chicago Merc to raise its margin requirements for options on S. & P. 500 Index futures twice, first from two per cent to three per cent, and then from three per cent to four per cent. Niederhoffer was asked to double the amount of capital supporting his positions, and he found it difficult to raise the necessary cash. Some of his investments had lost a lot of their value, and the value of others was difficult to determine. There were so many moving parts in his portfolio that he wasn’t sure where he stood. When a trader can’t meet his margin requirements, he is at the mercy of his creditors. As Niederhoffer’s financial situation deteriorated, ADM Investor Services, a Chicago-based brokerage firm that caters to futures traders, ordered him to liquidate some of his options positions. Working late into the night, Niederhoffer berated himself for leaving himself so exposed. Referring to the margin calls, he said to one acquaintance, “I shouldn’t have been in the position where it could have had such an impact.” Despite the lessons of 1997, and the precautions he had taken, he was again in over his head.
波动性的增加导致芝加哥交易所2次提高标准普尔500股指期货期权的保证金，第一次从1%提高到3%，第二次从3%提高到4%。尼德霍夫则被通知要追加保证金，以维持自己的仓位，但他发现自己没有足够的资金。他的很多投资亏钱了，其它投资则情况不明。他投资的资产项目太多了，他不知道要把哪个平仓。一旦一个交易者无法面对追加保证金的通知，他就要看他的投资者怎么想了。随着尼德霍夫金融状态变坏，芝加哥的经纪公司ADM投资者服务公司命令它平掉部分期权仓位。尼德霍夫工作到深夜，痛骂自己的仓位太重。关于追加保证金的通知，他对一个熟人说：“我真不应该持有如此重的仓位，打击太大。”虽然他在1997年吃了教训，自己也谨慎了，但是这次又头昏了。
Every August, Niederhoffer throws a big party in New York City, to which he invites dozens of regular contributors to his Web site as well as some of his friends. This year, there were about seventy-five guests. Most were New Yorkers, but some had come from as far away as England. For three days, Niederhoffer entertained them at his expense. On Friday, he organized a trip to the New York Botanical Garden and to a Mets game. On Saturday, he hosted a beach outing at Coney Island and a dinner at Delmonico’s, near Wall Street. On Sunday, he provided a picnic brunch in Central Park’s Conservatory Garden.
每年8月，尼德霍夫都要在纽约开一个大派对，他会邀请他网站上的很多人，还有很多朋友。今天，他邀请了75个客人。大部分是纽约人，但也有一些人是从英国赶来的。3天来，尼德霍夫自费招待他们。周五，他带大家去纽约植物园参加一个游戏。周六，他在康尼岛和华尔街附近的戴尔莫尼克餐馆招待客人。周日，他在中央公园的温室花园搞野餐活动。
As the crisis in the market spread, Niederhoffer had briefly considered cancelling the party, but he decided that to do so would have alerted people to his troubles. At three o’clock on Saturday afternoon, I saw him in the crowd on the boardwalk at Coney Island, across from the Cyclone roller coaster. As usual, he wasn’t difficult to spot: he was wearing yellow trousers and a yellow T-shirt that said “Chief Speculator” on the back. On the beach, his staff had set up a blue canopy, and about a dozen people had gathered underneath it, taking shelter from the sun.
随着危机的蔓延，尼德霍夫也不想取消派对，因为这么做会让客人感到警觉。周六下午3点，我看见他在康尼岛玩过山车。就像平时一样，他不太好找：他穿着黄裤子，黄T恤衫，背面还写着：“投机之王”。他的员工在海滩上搭了一个大蓬，几十人挤在下面，因为太阳很晒。
Niederhoffer had Aubrey on his shoulders, and he seemed to be in a better mood than when I had last seen him. He makes frequent visits to Coney Island and Brighton Beach; the house he lived in as a boy was about half a mile east of where we were standing. “We are going on the Wonder Wheel,” Niederhoffer said, gesturing over his shoulder at the slowly turning Ferris wheel, which dates to 1920. While he was gone, I spoke with two of his guests, a young Liberian M.B.A. student who said that he had recently posted an article on DailySpeculations.com about gambling on thoroughbred racing, and an older Frenchman who traded stocks at a Wall Street firm. The atmosphere was friendly and relaxed. None of the guests mentioned Niederhoffer’s financial predicament.
尼德霍夫把奥布里托在肩膀上，他似乎比我上次看见的时候状态要好。他经常去康尼岛和布莱顿海滩，他小时候准的房子离他现在站的地方大约有半英里。尼德霍夫指着摩天轮说：“我们去玩摩天轮。”，那是1920年就有的摩天轮。当他去玩的时候，我和他的2个客人聊天，一个是利比里亚年轻的工商管理硕士学生，他说他最近在dailyspeculations.com发了一个帖子，内容是关于赌马的，另一个人是法国人，年纪大些，他在华尔街的公司交易股票。我们谈话的气氛有好而轻松。没有一个客人提到了尼德霍夫的金融困境。
At 6 P.M., the party reconvened at Delmonico’s, which Niederhoffer had reserved for the evening. After cocktails in the dark-panelled bar, his guests entered the ornate dining room, where a Broadway tap dancer and a family of Hawaiian singers performed. I was seated next to Laurel Kenner and Aubrey, but didn’t see much of Niederhoffer, who was wearing a lilac jacket and spent most of the evening table-hopping. After dessert was served, he stood up to speak.
下午6点，大家到戴尔莫尼克餐馆吃饭，尼德霍夫已经预定好了。在黑木酒吧喝完鸡尾酒以后，客人们就来到了豪华的餐厅。那里有百老汇式的跳舞表演和夏威夷的歌手在唱歌。我坐在劳雷尔·肯特和奥布里的旁边，但是很少看见尼德霍夫，他穿着紫色的夹克，整个晚上周旋于不同的餐桌之间。上了点心之后，他站起来说话了。
“This is a historic gathering,” he said, swaying slowly back and forth. “We are here in the middle of one of the greatest turmoils in Wall Street history. I am sure that many of you are keen to know how we are doing. Well, I can tell you that it has been very difficult. The battle has been joined, and it is still to be determined who the victor is. I always say that when you are in the middle of one of these situations it is better to say nothing. If you say you are doing badly, it gives ammunition to your enemies. If you say you are doing well, you are tempting fate. . . . We will see what happens and who wins the final point.”
他轻微地前摇后摆地说：“这是历史性的聚会。我们在华尔街有史以来最大的动荡中聚会。我知道，有很多人想知道我们做的如何。嗯，我将告诉你们确实有困难。战争刚开始，还不知道谁会赢。我总是说，如果你处于这种状况，最好还是不要随便说话。如果你说你做的很差，这等于涨他人志气。如果你说你做的很好，等于有点玩世不恭……我们还是拭目以待吧，看看最终谁会赢。”
Later in August, after the Federal Reserve cut the discount rate—the rate at which it lends to banks—the markets calmed down; but Niederhoffer’s woes continued. In September, he was forced to close two of his funds, including his flagship, Matador, which had declined in value by more than seventy-five per cent. After cashing out many of his investments, Niederhoffer repaid his lenders and returned what money was leftover to his clients. He laid off several employees and consulted with his lawyers. Meanwhile, rumors circulated on the Internet that, for the second time in a decade, his funds had “blown up.”
8月下旬，美联储宣布降低贴现率——也就是它借给银行的利率——市场平静了，但是尼德霍夫的痛苦还在继续。9月，他被迫关闭了2个基金，包括他的旗舰斗牛士基金，斗牛士跌了75%以上。当他把大部分仓位平掉以后，尼德霍夫偿还了客户剩余的钱，以及投资者的钱。他开除了一些员工，并找了律师。同时网上有流言说，10年来他的基金第二次破产。
Had he been able to wait a little longer before liquidating his trades, his funds might have recouped most of the losses. After the Federal Reserve cut interest rates again, on September 18th, the stock market rallied further and volatility decreased. Still, Niederhoffer sounded philosophical. “The market was not as liquid as I anticipated,” he said. “The movements in volatility were greater than I had anticipated. We were prepared for many different contingencies, but this kind of one we were not prepared for.” Niederhoffer was still trading for his own account, and for some remaining clients. “My basic ideas about the creative power of the market, buying in panics, buying on weakness—I don’t think what has happened has anything to do with that stuff,” he said. “I am going to keep going, for better or worse.”
如果他再等等，迟点平仓，他的基金是可以挽回大部分亏损的。当美联储再次降低贴现率之后，股市在9月18日大幅反弹。然而尼德霍夫还是有自己的哲学观点。他说：“市场的流动性还是没有想象的那么好。波动的能量比我想象的要大。我们已经准备好了面对各种意外事故，但是还是没想到这次事故会发生。”尼德霍夫仍然为自己和部分剩余的客户交易。他说：“我的基本市场思想是创造性的力量，在恐慌时买入，在弱市买入——但是已经发生的事和这些思想都没有关系。不管好不好，我还要继续交易。”