The Secret Club That Runs the World: Inside the Fraternity of Commodity Traders Read Online Free PDF Page A

year after crisis hit—because of the recession that was pinching consumer spending. Reading up onthe macroeconomic factors at play in the key oil-producing and oil-consuming nations gave a trader like Andurand a feel for what was possible. But in the end, trading crude involved much more guesswork than trading shares of Dell Computer.
    Andurand had always been competitive. As a baby in Aix, he crawled out of his family’s ninth-floor apartment and up a wall on the balcony before his mother pulled him to safety. When he got his first bicycle with training wheels, he threw a fit until she removed them. He begged for fancy shoes and other
accoutrements
that his parents, who worked as a civil engineer for the French government and a teacher, could not afford. Despite having comfortable homes in Aix and in Réunion, his frequent grousing spurred a family joke: that he was Dugommeau, the hero of a popular French comic strip
Les Frustrés
, “The Frustrated.”
    In elementary school, Andurand’s teachers suggested that he skip a grade, saying he had a genius-level intellect. His mother Danielle, obliged, but laughed at the idea nonetheless. “Those tests don’t mean anything,” she says. Even after the grade-jump, school bored her young son.
    Swimming became his obsession. By the time Andurand was in high school in Aix, he was swimming twice a day, six days a week at the suburban
piscine
near his high school. At fifteen, he impressed his coaches with a record-breaking time in the 200-meter freestyle competition; it would become his signature event. By age sixteen, he was the second-fastest swimmer in that race on the continent and had earned a spot on France’s junior national team.
    Through those interminable laps in the pool, a longer-term objective drove him: to compete in the Olympics. He wanted to test himself against some of the top athletes in the world.
    The 1996 summer Olympic Games in Atlanta were a few years away, and his pace was a little short of the mark, but he thought there was time to improve. He enrolled at the National Institute for Applied Science, or Institut National des Sciences Appliquées, in Toulouse, a much larger city in southwestern France near the Pyrénées, where he could train with a superior university swim team while working toward a five-year engineering degree. But almost immediately after arriving, his performance slowed significantly. The pool in Toulouse was shorter than its counterpart in Aix, and the more frequent flip-turns hurt his performance. What had once been his lean athlete’s diet also suffered. Instead of eating six thousand calories a day of the low-fat protein and vegetables his mother had always made, he was suddenly piling on pounds from ice cream and pizza binges.
    He also spent five hours a day in relative solitude at the pool, where the other guys were standoffish. “In Aix, I was the number one swimmer,” Andurand says. “In Toulouse I was one of the group, not one of the very best.”
    He had hit a mental block. Extra workouts weren’t helping, so instead of pushing his body so hard, he relaxed and caught up on lost sleep. His times began to get better, just enough to make a difference. After riding him for weeks, his coach, who had at one point asked if he had used performance-enhancing drugs to speed his times in Aix, backed off. But Andurand’s times still weren’t what he’d hoped. Atlanta felt like an impossible goal. He could get a bit better, he figured, but he would never be good enough to make an Olympic final. Genetically speaking, he just wasn’t built for it.
    It was a harsh revelation, and Andurand had no idea how to fillthe gap in his life. “He was quite depressed,” remembers his mother. “He couldn’t imagine a life without passion.”
    He avoided drugs and alcohol because he didn’t like the idea of losing control. He’d observed some of his teammates getting loaded in Toulouse, and found the spectacle terribly sad. But he needed an