The Man Who Solved The Market (20)
A year or two earlier, Baum couldn't stop thinking about math; now it was trading that occupied his mind. Lying on a beach with his family one morning during the summer of 1979, Baum mulled the extended weakness in the value of the British pound. At the time, the conventional wisdom was that the currency could only fall in value. One expert who advised Simons and Baum on their trading made so much selling pounds that he named his son Sterling.
一两年之前，鲍姆一直不停的在思考数学；现在交易占据了他的思绪。1979年夏天的一个早晨，鲍姆和家人正躺在海滩上，思索着英镑持续贬值的问题。当时人们普遍认为货币只会贬值。一位曾给西蒙斯和鲍姆在交易方面提供建议的专家卖出许多英镑，他甚至给儿子起名叫斯特林(Sterling)
Relaxing on the beach that morning, Baum sat straight up, overcome with excitement. He was convinced a buying opportunity was at hand. Baum raced to the office, telling Simons that Margaret Thatcher, Britain's new prime minister, was keeping the currency at unsustainably low levels.
那天早晨在沙滩上放松的时候，鲍姆激动的坐直了身子。他确信买入机会就在眼前。他赶紧跑到办公室，告诉西蒙斯，英国的新首相玛格丽特·撒切尔将英镑维持在一个不可持续的低水平上。
"Thatcher is sitting on the pound," Baum said. "She can't hold it down much longer."
“撒切尔正坐在英镑上，“鲍姆说”她不可能维持太久了。”
Baum said they needed to buy pounds, but Simons was amused, rather than swayed, by Baum's sudden conviction.
鲍姆说他们需要买进英镑，但西蒙斯被鲍姆突如其来的想法逗乐了，而不是被说服
"Lenny, it's too bad you didn't come in earlier," Simons responded, smiling. "Thatcher stood up…… The pound just rose five cents."
“莱尼，你没早点来真是太糟了，”西蒙斯笑着回应他。“撒切尔站起来了……英镑刚涨了5美分。”
That morning, it turned out, Thatcher had decided to let the pound rise in price. Baum was unfazed.
事实证明，那天早晨撒切尔决定让英镑升值。鲍姆很淡定
"That's nothing!" He insisted. "It's going to go up fifty cents — maybe more!"
“这并没什么！”他很坚持。“英镑将会上涨50美分——也许会更多！”
Baum was right. He and Simons kept buying British pounds, and the currency kept soaring. They followed that move with accurate predictions for the Japanese yen, West German deutsche mark, and Swiss franc, gains that had the South American investors calling Simons with congratulations and encouragement as the fund grew by tens of millions of dollars.
鲍姆是对的。他和西蒙斯持续买进英镑，而英镑也一直在飙升。随后他们精确的预测了日元、西德马克以及瑞士法郎的走势。随着基金资产增加了数千万美元，南美的投资者致电西蒙斯表示祝贺和鼓励。
Fellow mathematicians still scratched their heads about why Simons had discarded a promising career to sit in a makeshift office trading currency contracts. They were just as stunned that Baum and Ax had joined him. Even Simons's father seemed disappointed. In 1979, at a bar mitzvah party for Simons's son Nathaniel, Matty Simons told a Stony Brook mathematician, "I like to say, 'My son, the professor,' not 'My son, the businessman.'"
同行的数学家仍然百思不得其解，为什么西蒙斯要放弃一份前途光明的职业，而选择坐在临时办公室里进行外汇交易。而鲍姆和艾克斯的加入让他们更震惊。甚至西蒙斯的父亲看起来也很失望。1979年在西蒙斯的儿子纳撒尼尔的成人礼上，马蒂·西蒙斯告诉一位石溪分校的数学家，“我喜欢说‘我儿子是教授’，而不是说‘我儿子是商人’。”
Simons spent little time looking back. After racking up early currency winnings, Simons amended Limroy's charter to allow it to trade US Treasury bond futures contracts as well as commodities. He and Baum — who now had their own, separate investment accounts — assembled a small team to build sophisticated models that might identify profitable trades in currency, commodity, and bond markets.
西蒙斯几乎没有时间回头看。早期在汇率交易上获利之后，西蒙斯修改了Limroy的章程，允许其进行美国国债以及大宗商品交易。他和鲍姆——两个人已经拥有自己独立的投资账户——组成了一个小组去建立复杂的模型，该模型可以在货币、商品以及债券市场上识别出能获利的交易
Simons was having a blast exploring his lifelong passion for financial speculation while trying to solve markets, perhaps the greatest challenge he had encountered. Besides, he joked, his wife Marilyn at last could "hang out with people and know what they were talking about."
西蒙斯在试图解决市场问题时，也在探索他毕生对金融投机的热情，这或许是他遇到的最大的挑战。此外，他开玩笑说，他的妻子玛丽莲终于可以“和别人一起出去并知道他们在说什么了”。
The fun wouldn't last.
这种乐趣并未持续太久。
Searching for someone to program his computers, Simons heard about a nineteen-year-old onthe verge of getting kicked out of the California Institute of Technology. Greg Hullender was sharp and creative, but ha had trouble focusing on his schoolwork and did poorly in many of his courses. Later in life, he would be diagnosed with attention-deficit disorder. At the time, Hullender was frustrated by his struggles, as were the school's administrators. The last straw came when he was caught running an unauthorized, high-stakes trading operation out of his dorm room. Friends pooled their cash and handed it to Hullender, who purchased stock options before a market rally in 1978, turning $200 into $2,000 in a matter of days. Soon, everyone in the dorm wanted in on the operation, throwing money at Hullender, who began repackaging stock options purchased through a brokerage account at Merrill Lynch and reselling them to eager students.
在寻找能为公司交易编程的伙伴时，西蒙斯听说了一个19岁的男孩即将被加州理工学院开除。格雷格·胡伦德思维敏捷且有创造性，但是他很难专注在学校功课上，很多门课程的成绩很差。后来他被诊断为注意力缺陷障碍。当时，胡伦德对他的挣扎感到沮丧，学校管理人员也是如此。他在宿舍房间里进行未经授权的、高风险的交易活动，成为压倒他的最后一根稻草。胡伦德在1978年股市上涨之前买了股票期权，朋友们倾尽自己的现金交给他，仅几天200美元就变成了2000美元。很快，宿舍里的每个人都想参与进来，把钱投给胡伦德，而胡伦德通过美林的经纪账户购买了股票期权并重新包装，然后转售给那些渴望赚钱的学生。
"It was like my own stock exchange," Hullender says, with pride.
“这就像是我自己的股票交易所,”胡伦德不无骄傲的说道
Merrill Lynch officials weren't amused by his ingenuity. Citing Hullender for violating the terms of his account, the brokerage pilled the plug on his venture and the school kicked him out. Sitting in his dorm room, waiting to be expelled, Hullender was startled by a seven a.m. phone call from Simons. Simons had heard about Hullender's unlicensed trading operation through a Caltech grad student and was impressed bu Hullender's understanding of financial markets, as well as his moxie. Simons offered Hullender a salary of $9,000 a year, as well as share of his firm's profits, to come to New York to program Limroy's trades.
美林的管理人员对他的聪明才智并不买账。经纪人以胡伦德违反账户条款为由终止了他的创业计划，学校把他开除了。坐在宿舍里，他等着被开除。早晨七点胡伦德被一通来自西蒙斯的电话吓了一跳。西蒙斯从一位加州理工的研究生那里听说了胡伦德那些未经授权的交易操作，他对金融市场的理解和勇气让西蒙斯印象深刻。西蒙斯给胡伦德提供了每年9000美元的薪水以及公司分红，让他去纽约为Limroy的交易编制程序
With a round, cherubic face, shaggy brown hair, and a boyish smile, Hullender looked like a teenager heading off to summer camp, not someone cut out for across-country trip to join an unknown trading operation. Rail-thin with thick, oversized glasses, Hullender kept pens in his front pocket, along with a brown case for his spectacles, a look that made him appear especially guileless.
胡伦德长着一张圆圆的娃娃脸，杂乱的棕色头发，带着一抹孩子气的微笑，看起来像个要去参加夏令营的青少年，而不是一个准备横穿全国去加入一个未知的交易机构的人。胡伦德骨瘦如柴，带着一副很大的眼镜，前胸口袋插着钢笔，还有一个棕色的眼镜盒，这样的打扮让他显得特别老实。
Hullender hadn't met Simons or Baum and was wary of the job offer.
胡伦德并没有见到西蒙斯或是鲍姆，这让他对这份工作谨慎了起来。
"Jim's firm sounded like the shadiest thing in the world," he says.
“吉姆的公司听起来像是世界上最可疑的东西，”他说
The young man didn't hesitate to accept Simons's offer, however.
然而这位年轻人却毫不犹豫的接受了西蒙斯的邀约。
"I was in my dorm room waiting to get kicked out — it's not like I had a lot of options."
“当时我正在宿舍里等着被开除——我并没有太多选择。”
Hullender moved to Long Island, staying with Simons and his family for several weeks until he rented a room in a nearby Stony Brook dormitory. The young man didn't have a driver's license, so Simons lent him a bicycle to get to work. At the office, Simons, wearing his usual open-collared cotton shirt and loafers, gave Hullender a tutorial on how he approached trading. Currency markets are affected by the actions of governments and others, Simons told him, and his firm hoped to develop detailed, step-by-step algorithms to identify "trends that result from hidden actors influencing the market," not unlike what Simons did at the IDA to break enemy code.
胡伦德搬去了长岛，跟西蒙斯和他的家人在一起呆了几周，直到他在附近的石溪分校租到了一间宿舍。这个年轻人没有驾照，所以西蒙斯借给他一辆自行车去上班。在办公室里，西蒙斯穿着平常穿的开领棉衬衫和乐福鞋，给胡伦德上了一课教他如何交易。西蒙斯告诉他，外汇市场会受到政府行为以及其他因素的影响，他的公司希望能开发一种精细的、渐进式的算法，可以识别出“影响市场的隐藏因素导致的趋势”，这与西蒙斯在IDA破解敌方密码的做法没什么区别。
Hullender began by writing a program to track the new firm's results. Within six months, Hullender's figures showed disturbing losses — Simons's shift to bond trading had gone awry. Clients kept calling, but now they were asking why they were losing so much money, rather than extending congratulations.
胡伦德开始编写一个程序追踪新公司的业绩。不到6个月，胡伦德的数据显示出令人不安的亏损——西蒙斯转向债券交易的策略出了错。客户一直打电话来，但是他们现在追问的是为什么损失了那么多钱而不是表示祝贺。
Simons seemed to take the downturn hard, growing more anxious as the losses increased. On one especially rough day, Hullender found his boss lying supine on a couchin his office. Hullender sensed Simons wanted to open up to him, perhaps even make some kind of confession.
西蒙斯看起来很难接受这种倒退，随着损失的增加他也越来越焦虑。在一个特别艰难的日子，胡伦德发现他的老板躺在办公室的沙发上。胡伦德觉得西蒙斯可能想对他敞开心扉，也许甚至进行忏悔。
"Sometimes I look at this and feel I'm just some guy who doesn't really know what he's doing," Simons said.
“有时候我看着这些，觉得我只是一个并不真的知道他在做什么的人，”西蒙斯说道。
（免责声明：仅供个人阅读学习及翻译参考。如有不准之处，请留言帮助改进）
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