Chapter Twenty-Two: The Trading Room

In June 2014 the ABC reported that dozens of Australians had lost fees of up to thirty thousand dollars each through a program called 21st Century Eminis — a virtual trading room that taught people to trade the stock market — and that complaints made to a number of authorities including the Financial Ombudsman Service had not gained traction.

The premise: pay up to thirty thousand. Log in each morning. Watch an expert trade the E-mini S&P futures live. Mirror his trades.

Make money while you sleep — and if you are mirroring a US session from Australia you are, literally, doing exactly that, which was a joke Jamie made from stage for four straight years and which never once failed.

The expert was David Loughnan, who had come across from the Kaye network the way everybody came across from the Kaye network, the way water finds a channel. When the ABC asked him about his terms of employment, he declined to answer.

The structure

Here is the fraud, and it is elegant, and it requires nobody to lie about a single trade:

A trading room's profitability for the operator is entirely independent of the trading.

The operator's revenue is the membership fee. Thirty thousand dollars, times dozens, collected up front.

The trading result is a marketing expense.

If the room is up, you have a testimonial.

If the room is down, you have a teaching moment about risk management and the psychology of loss — and you sell the advanced module.

There is no version of the trading outcome that costs the operator money.

That's it. That is the whole thing.

Trevor

A Gold Coast house at 11:40pm, the US open. Twelve screens.

And a thousand kilometres away, in a lounge room in Toowoomba, a man named Trevor Aylwood — fifty-three, a diesel fitter, thirty thousand dollars of an inheritance from his mother liquidated to be here — sits with a laptop, a cup of tea, and his reading glasses on.

Trevor has a notebook.

Trevor takes it seriously. Trevor has never in his life had an opportunity like this and he is determined to do it properly.

The room opens. The voice comes through the headset.

"Morning team. Bit choppy overnight. We're going to be patient today."

Trevor writes PATIENT in the notebook.

By week four he is down four thousand one hundred dollars on a course he has not finished paying for.

By week eleven he is down nine thousand six hundred, and he has begun to notice a pattern in how the room discusses losses, which is that it doesn't. Winning trades are reviewed in detail the following morning. Losing trades are part of the process.

By week sixteen he stops logging in.

He phones the office nine times. The first three calls are answered warmly by a young woman who takes his details. The fourth is answered by somebody who explains that refunds are governed by the terms and conditions he signed — clause 14.3, at the intensive, on the third day, at 4:40 in the afternoon, with his blood up.

He goes to the Financial Ombudsman Service. The complaint does not gain traction; the product sits in a crevice between jurisdictions like a coin down the back of a couch.

He does not tell his wife for five months.

And that is the scene the novel has to earn, and Jamie McIntyre is not in it.

At the precise moment Trevor Aylwood is on hold to a receptionist in Southport, Jamie McIntyre is on a boat.

That is the crime. Not the trading room — the absence. The fact that a man can build a machine that eats Trevor Aylwood's mother's money and never once be in the room when it happens, and can therefore go to his grave genuinely, sincerely, ferociously believing that he never hurt anybody.