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After that, the men in the room rushed for the exits, apparently to sell their shares in Bear Stearns. By the time Alan Greenspan arrived to speak, there was hardly anyone who cared to hear what he had to say. The audience was gone. By Monday, Bear Stearns was of course gone, too, sold to J.P. Morgan for $2 a share.*

The people rising out of the hole in the ground on the northeast corner of Madison Avenue and Forty-seventh Street at 6:40 in the morning revealed a great deal about themselves, if you knew what to look for. Anyone in that place at that time probably worked on Wall Street, for instance. The people emerging from the holes surrounding Penn Station, where Vincent Daniel's train arrived at exactly the same time, weren't so easy to predict. "Vinny's morning train is only fifty-five percent financial, because that's where the construction workers come in," said Danny Moses. "Mine's ninety-five." To the untrained eye, the Wall Street people who rode from the Connecticut suburbs to Grand Central were an undifferentiated mass, but within that mass Danny noted many small and important distinctions. If they were on their BlackBerrys, they were probably hedge fund guys, checking their profits and losses in the Asian markets. If they slept on the train they were probably sell-side people--brokers, who had no skin in the game. Anyone carrying a briefcase or a bag was probably not employed on the sell side, as the only reason you'd carry a bag was to haul around brokerage research, and the brokers didn't read their own reports--at least not in their spare time. Anyone carrying a copy of the New York Times was probably a lawyer or a back-office person or someone who worked in the financial markets without actually being in the markets.

Their clothes told you a lot, too. The guys who ran money dressed as if they were going to a Yankees game. Their financial performance was supposed to be all that mattered about them, and so it caused suspicion if they dressed too well. If you saw a buy-side guy in a suit, it usually meant that he was in trouble, or scheduled to meet with someone who had given him money, or both. Beyond that, it was hard to tell much about a buy-side person from what he was wearing. The sell side, on the other hand, might as well have been wearing their business cards: The guy in the blazer and khakis was a broker at a second-tier firm; the guy in the three-thousand-dollar suit and the hair just so was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan or someplace like that. Danny could guess where people worked by where they sat on the train. The Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, and Merrill Lynch people, who were headed downtown, edged to the front--though when Danny thought about it, few Goldman people actually rode the train anymore. They all had private cars. Hedge fund guys such as himself worked uptown and so exited Grand Central to the north, where taxis appeared haphazardly and out of nowhere to meet them, like farm trout rising to corn kernels. The Lehman and Bear Stearns people used to head for the same exit as he did, but they were done. One reason why, on September 18, 2008, there weren't nearly as many people on the northeast corner of Forty-seventh Street and Madison Avenue at 6:40 in the morning as there had been on September 18, 2007.

Danny noticed many little things about his fellow financial man--that was his job, in a way. To notice the little things. Eisman was the big-picture guy. Vinny was the analyst. Danny, the head trader, was their eyes and ears on the market. Their source for the sort of information that never gets broadcast or written down: rumors, the behavior of the sell-side brokers, the patterns on the screens. His job was to be alive to detail, quick with numbers--and to avoid getting fucked.

To that end he kept five computer screens on his desk. One scrolled newswires, another showed moment-to-moment movements inside their portfolio, the other three scrolled Danny's conversations with maybe forty Wall