made any sense, but it was two o’clock in themorning.
“Your account has no open trades at this time, sir.”
Oh, no. “Do I owe you money?” I asked. “I had a terrible trade today, Ithink.”
“You did have a losing trade,” she answered quickly. “You bought theGBP/USD at 1.8170 this afternoon. The trade was closed just a little whilelater. You got a margin call.”
“A margin call?”
“Well, you put up $500 in margin to trade two standard lots. This re-duced your available margin to $1,200. When your losses reached $1,200,you had used up all the available margin. So we closed your trade automat-ically as a service to you. This leaves you with the $500 in margin in youraccount.”
“As a service to me?” I noticed on my charts that the price had risenback up afterward. I told her so. “Why not keep it open for me?”
“We did that up until a few years ago. But traders were leaving losingtrades open so long that they owed us money. That was worse.”
Iimmediately agreed. That left me with this fact: I had lost $1,200. Onethousand two hundred dollars. In one day. One trade.
Ithen hung up the phone.
When I looked up, my wife was standing beside me, looking at thecomputer screen over my shoulder.
“Did you make a trade?” she asked. “This late at night?”
What was I going to tell her?
MY WIFE’S ANGRY EYES
 
I told Gini everything, starting with the lunch with Craig all the way up tothe time when I called the dealer and found out that my trading accounthad burst into flames.
She was angry. Not about the trade—which surprised me—but aboutmy job.
My Wire: How could you let this happen?Me: [silence]
 
Trying to Awake from the Nightmare 61
There wasn’t anything smart for me to say. My wife needed to hear thetruth, but the problem was that the truth didn’t make any sense, and shewas only going to think it was a lie.
I told her: “I am not sure I had any choice in the matter at all. I mean, itwas over before it began. I got back from lunch with Craig and wham! Her-bie fired me.”
“But how? On what grounds? You’ve been there 11 years!” Calling myboss Herbie didn’t help; it only increased the notion that I wasn’t serious orworried about any of this.
“I don’t know.” I'd been right. The truth came off worse than a liewould have. I could have just told her a lie and it would have been muchbetter. Something like this:
My Wire: But why? Why did they fire you?
Me: I told you that I don’t know. It might have something to do with thehandicapped person.
My Wire: What handicapped person?
Me: The firm is suing a handicapped person—a quintiplegic Rwandanrefugee—and I sneaked a peek at the files while I was scanning theminto the system. We are suing this poor man for $20,000 because he hitHerbie Johnson right in the crotch with his wheelchair. The firm hasseven attorneys working on it [I wipe a single tear from my eye].
My Wire: How terrible! How could you stand for that?
Me: Well, I didn’t. I copied the entire case file, with some very damagingevidence that proves that Herbie was not in fact fitted with a prostheticyou-know-what. That medical report is the smoking gun document inthe case. And I gave the entire file to the poor handicapped man’s attor-ney today. And my forex dealer promised to donate my losses from thisone trade to this poor man from Rwanda.
My Wire: You did the right thing! You are my hero!
“Hello? Hello, Harry! Are you listening to me?”
I fell back to earth and my wife’s angry eyes were staring at me. I nevergot the chance to explain to Gini all about the Rwandan refugee. She juststarted crying.
“So you really have no clue as to why he fired you?” She was drying hereyes with her robe and sobbing quietly on purpose so that she did not wakethe children.
All this was very distressing. Especially because we hadn’t evenstarted to talk about the bad trade, which was going to make matters evenworse. And we couldn’t even get to that horrible subject until I could tellher why I lost my job. Maybe I would get the chance to tell her about thequintiplegic and the wheelchair.
 
  
 
62 ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
“And we're going to lose our benefits,” she noted. “How are we goingto pay for the pregnancy?”
I shook my head. Her worry was starting to transfer itself head on,right to me. My leg was going to start shaking any moment, because I real-ized that the delivery of a healthy baby would cost over $10,000. We wereonly a few months away. How was I going to raise that kind of money? Ishould have demanded an extra 10 grand from Herbie.
Instead, I said: “I don’t know! Really! I don’t know. This was my worstday in forever. It was terrible. Herbie came after me like he was hunting medown. Angrier than I have ever seen him. Something was very wrong,something that he thinks that I did. Something so bad that he wanted toblame someone for it. He needed a scapegoat, and I was going to be theone. I think that’s why they offered me so much money to leave. They’dneeded to place the blame on someone and I fit the description.”
She sniffled. “That would explain why he didn’t tell you why he was fir-ing you. Because he knew you didn’t do anything wrong, and he didn’t wantto give you a chance to defend yourself.”
“And now they can place the blame on me and say they’ve taken careof the problem.”
I wondered if it was Herbie who had done something wrong. “Youknow,” I told her, “I could probably still talk to an attorney. There is no wayIcould have done something so wrong to deserve being fired.”
“You were a good employee.”
Ishrugged. We were both calming down by talking about it. “I wasn’t agood employee. I was a great filing manager, but I took advantage of themalot. Ihad even started to do my trading on the job.”
She didn’t argue. She knew how much I disliked the job and wasn’tgoing to blame me for not being thrilled about going to work every day.
“Do you think you can still trade?”
This was unexpected. I deserved a beating for the way I had acted withforex trading. In fact, I had half decided never to take another trade. Betterto get out with a five-hundred-dollar overall loss, than trade the rest of theaccount into the toilet. On the other hand, what were my job prospects?Wakeman, Butterman, and Bailey would give a rotten reference for me ifthey agreed to offer one at all. And I had no other marketable skills. And Iliked trading. And I had Craig, and perhaps Craig’s mentor.
And as simply as that, I decided that from that time onward, I wasgoing to be a full-time trader.
“I think I can still trade,” I told Gini.
She smiled. My heart jumped. A smile popped onto my face. My skintingled, and a shot of happy adrenaline shot up my spine.
Icould do this!
 
 
Charlie FlankGoes to U.S.National Bank
 
I called Craig the next day.
Crate: Don't think of this as a wrench in the gearbox. Think of this asa chance for you to pay some rent with the severance; sit down and-make a trading plan; and think about how you want your family’s futureto look. I was forced to do this after my big trading loss—most tradetraders put themselves in some kind of disaster scenario at the begin-ning. But you can choose what you want to do about it.
Me: Did you trade after the FOMC interest rate decision?
Crate: Yes, I sure did. I bought the British Pound for a quick profit. Imight have been getting out just as you were getting in.
ME: How did you know to do that?
Crate: I followed the immediate movement. I was ready to buy Poundsright away, as soon as I saw price move up quickly. Price jumped upin the first minute and then fell back down, but as soon as it continuedhigher than the first move, I bought. I got in at 1.8130, and a fewmoments later, I was positive by 40 pips. I was tempted to take themoney and get out. But I have a profit target at a previous level ofsupport and resistance, where price stopped cold several times thisyear, and as recently as just a week ago. People were yelling andscreaming around me to get out of the trade as it went into thered, but I am holding out for 1.8600. That’s 470 pips away, but itcan get there. I made up my mind before I took the trade today (seeFigure 8.1).
63
 
  
 
64 ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
 
(SAI GBPUSD - Daily
    
"hy tStalls again
Craig's Profit Target
w Feo War “ier
 
 
FIGURE 8.1 Craig makes up his mind.
Me: Did you learn how to do this kind of stuff on your own?
Crate: Mostly, yes. And with the help of a mentor and friend.
Me: How soon do you think that I can talk to your trading mentor?
Crate: Soon, yes.
Me: Where do I find him?
Crate: He'll find you.
Me: I'll just start studying some things about trading, maybe fix up thehouse a bit, things my wife has been wanting me to do anyway. And Ican start trading when I get over this bad experience.
Crate: No. Don't take any more trades right now.
Me: Why not?
Crate: Because you're a horrible trader.
Me: Thanks a lot.
Craie: You bet. Happy to boost your spirits anytime. Listen, I gotta run.Market’s gonna blast off here in a few minutes. Get some books. Dig in.See if you can sneak your way onto a Wall Street trading desk. You'll besurprised what you can learn by sitting there for a morning. Then callme back.
ME: Okay.
SNEAKING INTO U.S. NATIONAL BANK
 
I put on my only suit. I borrowed my neighbor's briefcase. I shined myshoes. I hadn't looked this good for work in at least 10 years. And I was
 
Charlie Flank Goes to U.S. National Bank 65
going to need to look my best indeed, because today I was going to becomeCharlie Flank.
All Gini knew was that I was following up ona job lead from Craig Tay-lor. Perhaps I could get myself a job on a trading floor. That was everythingthat she needed to know. I didn’t want to tell her I wasn’t making anytrades; she asked me twice the morning after our talk when I was going tobe making some money from full-time trading. Now that we had both com-mitted to my career as a trader, she expected that I would work at it like afull-time job.
But I knew that I should obey Craig’s advice. I wanted to trade—afterall, my first two trades were brilliant successes, and I had the AmazingForex software. It was hard enough to explain to Gini that I was going towait a day or two, let alone try to explain it over and over to myself.
The best way to pass the time, I decided, was to capture anotherglimpse of a trading floor. Armed with my list of nine Wall Street trading su-perstars that I had taken from the office, I decided that I had a chance ofseeing at least one more trading operation. If I couldn’t get on the floor atthe first two or three, then I would start begging for a tour. Surely one ofthe firms would allow tours.
It was Friday April 2, 2004. I took the C train to Wall Street, and at8:15 a.m., I entered an emotionless granite building that looked as muchlike a train station as a New York office building, and certainly was olderthan any of its surrounding firms. I knew that U.S. National Bank had atrading operation here, and because it was located in the heart of WallStreet, I assumed these guys were good. There were other firms on mylist that I’d taken from Wakeman on my last day at work; I came to U.S.National first because I wanted to visit Wall Street anyway. If I didn’t likeit here, or they didn’t let me in, I’d have my choice of three or four otherfirms nearby.
When I thought about it, I realized that being the filing manager at alaw firm had paid off in an important way. The Anderson case files werefull of names of Wall Street firms and traders; after all, the case was abouthow much a good trader deserved to be paid, and all I needed to look atwas the research compiled by our firm. The research file was a gold mineof information. With more time, I could have stockpiled a ton of names,salaries, addresses, and probably phone numbers of traders. But I'd onlyhad time to take the names of a few firms and individuals.
I knew that if I could investigate just one of these trading operations, Icould learn enough to convince Craig I was doing my part to be ready tolearn from him or his mentor. Craig had been right when he said that I wasa terrible trader. Who would want to work with me unless I at least learnedmore?
Which was exactly what I was going to do right then at U.S. NationalBank.
 
  
 
66 ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
I took the elevator up 20 floors and exited. There I found a front deskthat looked a lot like the one at Ernest Wellington, which protected a largedoor not much different from the steel one that I had passed through to seeAnderson and Craig and 200 other wild traders. I walked confidently up tothe desk and offered a professional smile that said, “You are about to letme in the large door.” But what I really said was:
Me: [have a file to drop off for Mr. Sutherland.
I knew from the Anderson files that Mr. Sutherland was an executive whoworked on the trading floor. My ingenious plan would now unfold like thenapkin on a fancy place setting, or some other thing that unfolds veryclassy-like and easily, without any problems from the police or buildingsecurity.
Borep REceEprIonist: Your name. Your firm.Me: Charlie Flank, with Wakeman, Butterman, and Bailey.
I was lying a lot more these days, and getting pretty good at it, or thepeople I was talking to were just getting dumber. Either way, the Bored Re-ceptionist was going to escort me through the trading door any moment. Icould feel it.
She didn’t even verify my credentials. What a pushover! After I signeda guest registry, she stuck a name tag on me that said VISITOR and CHAR-LIE FLANK, and then she unlocked the large door and let me through.
Next time I was just going to tell her to print me off a name badge andput me on the payroll! This was easy! I had assumed that Craig had beena genius for installing himself at a trading desk at Ernest Wellington.Not so! I could probably get myself onto five or six other trading floors inthe next week. If sneaking onto trading floors could pay money, I couldmake a living at it for sure. I was the James Bond of sneaking into WallStreet firms!
Before I could complete my fantasy, the receptionist led me onto amuch smaller trading floor than the one I had seen at Ernest Wellington.Maybe half as large. Probably 60 or 70 people in this room. But it wasn’t thesize of the space that seemed odd. Here everyone spoke in hushed voicesor not at all. I saw no sports sections from the Daily News. No messydesks. Hardly any computers! While every desk had a coffee cup and alarge phone with colorful buttons, not every desk had a computer monitor.While there had been three or four screens per desk at Ernest Wellington, Icould count on my hands the number in this room. Dark green carpet cov-ered the floor and stopped at each cherry-wood paneled wall. There werewindows on the western and northern walls, but most of the curtains were
 
Charlie Flank Goes to U.S. National Bank 67
drawn and the office was lit mostly by floor and table lamps. This lookedmore like an expensive steakhouse than a trading operation.
Perhaps I'd come to the wrong place. Apparently I had walked into agathering of men (no women in sight) who didn’t care what might happenin the markets that day. I’d soon find out I was right.
I suspected that the average age of the traders here was at least 45years. Some of them appeared older than that, maybe as old as 60 or 70.Not one of them wore anything but a blue or grey suit, with the coat stillon. At Ernest Wellington, I'd seen a trader wearing Bermuda shorts and aHawaiian shirt. That person would seem very out of place on this floor.
Each of these men had a spacious work area that was separated fromthe others; they were sitting at their own wooden desks and some of themeven had visitor's chairs in front of them. Some of them had small televi-sions on a side table. Only a few of them were tuned on, all of them show-ing CNBC. Melissa Francis was reporting from her luxury box above theNew York Mercantile Exchange.
If anyone here traded for a living, he would have a hard time proving itto me. Surely I had stopped at the wrong floor, for retired traders. Thesewere the stables where they put out the old men to pasture and told themto watch some news, visit with old friends, make a few phone calls, andhave a cup of coffee. Perhaps the Federal Reserve was about to make an-other interest rate announcement. That would explain the hush-hush envi-ronment and the focus on the few television monitors.
Talso decided that since I had gone to the trouble of sneaking onto thetrading floor, I deserved to know why in the world no one here seemed tobe trading. But I didn’t know who to ask. At Ernest Wellington, with every-one screaming, it seemed natural to talk with the first person I saw. Buthere I was intimidated. No one seemed alive, let alone happy to see a visi-tor. Since the receptionist had left me alone, I didn’t have a tour guide. Iconsidered walking out and moving on to the next firm.
Thank goodness, someone spoke to me first.
“Son, you look a mite lost. Who ya lookin for?”
The wrinkled face of a man at least 80 years of age smiled broadly atme. “Not too many of us here, I’m sure I can give you a hand.”
“What's everyone waiting for?” I asked him. “It’s quiet in here.”
He just looked back at me like my head was on fire. “Well, boy, it’squiet in here every day. This ain’t no two-bit operation up in Midtown.You're standing where John Pierpont Morgan himself used to stand, or atleast nearby.”
John Pierpont Morgan? Was that long for J. P. Morgan, the famousbanker from 10 million years ago?
“Wow,” I replied, hoping to appear as impressed as he obviouslywished I would be.
 
  
 
68 ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
“Well, then, if you’re waiting for someone, come on over here and youcan sit down.”
He guided me to a desk where a man not much younger—but muchbigger—than he was sitting. He towered over the desk in his chair; he wasprobably six and a half feet tall and had massive hands that made the me-chanical pencil in his hand look like a toothpick. He was playing solitairewith a worn deck of cards with the other hand, in between using the pencilto write notes on large sheets of graph paper in front of him. The desks oneither side were empty. It was clear this guy was a loner. I gathered upsome courage and sat myself down in one of the guest chairs in front ofhim. The other old man waddled off so weakly I wondered if he could findhis desk.
“Good morning,” he offered without looking up. “I don’t recognize you.Come here to gamble this morning? You new around here?”
I shook my head, but he wasn’t looking at me. I replied: “Gambling’snot really my thing. I’m just here to drop off some documents.”
He looked up. “Not dropping anything off on me, I hope.”
“Of course not.” I held out my hand to him. “Harry Banes.”
He grunted. “Looks like today you’re Charlie Flank.”
Ilooked down at my name tag. “Oh, that,” I replied. “That’s who I waswhen I checked in at the front desk.”
He furrowed his brow and looked at me oddly.
“IT sneaked in here because I want to be a trader. That’s the honesttruth. But I feel like I just took a trip to another planet.”
Ah, the truth. Telling it gave me the feeling of seeing an old friend. Well,at least an old friend that I had sold up the river.
He laughed, grinned, and stretched back in his chair and put the pencilbehind his ear. He spoke to me, but he spoke so loudly I suddenly felt veryconspicuous. Not wanting to draw attention to myself, I sunk a bit deeperinto the chair. He boomed: “Sounds like something I would have done fortyyears ago,” he told me. And then he pointed across to the television a fewdesks away. Melissa Francis was gone, replaced by a group of talkingheads who were saying things I couldn’t understand. The old man contin-ued: “You picked the right day to come in here. NFP [Non-Farm Payroll re-port] is out in two minutes. You’re gonna to see this place blow up like arock concert.”
“Really?”
He chortled and the pencil fell out of his ear. Istood up to get it for himbut his arms were so long he could reach down for it on his own. He of-fered his hand to me and we shook, my hand disappearing into his. With acloser look at him, I realized that although he appeared old, he had a sparkand energy that told me there were a lot of years left in him.
“Ts this place really going to blow up?” I asked again.
 
Charlie Flank Goes to U.S. National Bank 69
“No, Charlie,” he answered. “It’s not. It’s not going to hardly blow air.”He looked around him. “Half these guys don’t even know what day of theweek it is.”
“Oh, my name is Harry. Sorry for the confusion.” I tore off the name tagsticker, then said, “You mentioned that the NFP was coming out in a fewminutes.”
“Yep.”
I didn’t know what that meant. Was this a report like the FOMC min-utes? I wished that I could be sitting next to Craig Simpson right now, tosee what he would be doing. This guy wasn’t paying any attention to thetelevision any longer. He had returned to marking up his charts, continu-ally breaking the lead in the pencil. This frustrated him and finally he threwthe pencil in the trash can next to his desk.
“Gotta pen?”
I gave him mine.
“You don’t seem to be too concerned about the NFP,” I observed.
This impressed him. He wanted to be noticed for not paying attention.“Tm working on my charts this morning, like I do every first Friday. Listen,Tl give you a tip: You don’t trade the day of the report—you make longerterm bets after it’s out. Most of the young guys in this city are going to tradetheir brains out for the first hour after the report is out. They would selltheir own mothers to get this number before it’s released. But they don’thave to sit on the edge of their seats like they do. They can just wait to seewhat the number is, then make a rational plan.”
“From the other trading floor I’ve seen, rational behavior is in shortsupply. It was chaotic.”
He smiled. He was pleased that I understood him.
I stood up and looked down at his charts. There were X’s and O’s allacross his graph paper. It looked like a financial chart that I would see onTV, only instead of lines going up or down, there were X’s and O’s. He couldsee that I was interested.
“Point and figure charts, my friend. No one pays any attention any-more. But I still plot them by hand. Wait, here comes the number.”
The gentleman with the television closest to us turned up the volumeon his set and for a brief moment, most of the heads in the room turned tolook. The shot moved to some massive trading floor somewhere, with a re-porter smack dab in the middle of the room:
Rick SANTELLI: Three-hundred-eight thousand!It was as if Zeus has called down to his people. And he had told them
that he was coming to kill the trader who acted the most like a humanbeing. And that sent everyone on the television screen into a frenzy. The
 
  
 
70 ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
sound turned back down on the television, but all around the reporter, theplace blew up. Traders screamed at each other, throwing hand signals toeach other so quickly it was totally impossible to decipher anything. This isprobably what it looked like over at Ernest Wellington. How I wished Icould be there right then!
It was obvious to the old man in front of me that I had no idea whatwas going on. From the reaction in this room, I decided that no one herereally traded, but that they were all retired. We had lawyers like that backat Wakeman—old men who would shuffle around, tell dirty jokes, and gohome at 2:00 pM. every day.
While Craig at Ernest Wellington was furiously trading, along with allthe people around him, this man and his associates appeared not to belongon a trading floor at all. I got the feeling they had seen a lot of these re-ports, and they no longer held the same interest. He said: “Charlie, whatjust came out is the March jobs number. It tracks how many new jobs werecreated in the United States.”
“Okay. It looks like the people on television really care about it.”
“Right. Just like I said. Guys on Wall Street would chop off their feet toget just one of these numbers early. Today we got a good number. A greatnumber for short-term traders. Way off expectations. You can bet that a lotof guys and gals on the street are buying U.S. dollars right now. They’re bet-ting that today the dollar will go way up because of the number. But whatreally matters isn’t what happens in the next five minutes. What matters iswhat happens by the end of the day and then next week.”
“But you aren’t going to trade today?”
“Hello no.”
“When will you trade?”
He enjoyed this question. “I'll answer you without giving you the infor-mation you want. Do you have access to charts?”
“Currency charts?”
“Sure. Currency charts.”
Inodded. “Yes, at home.”
“Learn how to use them. But don’t look at the short-term charts. That'swhat the hooligans are focused on right now. You need to watch the longerterm charts.”
He had just called Craig Taylor a hooligan, just because he liked toshort-term trade. He seemed wise and friendly but totally ignorant of howmuch money could be made from the short-term trading that Craig did.Maybe I could ask a few more questions and then bail out of here.
“What’s the difference between short-term and long-term?” I asked.
“The young guys are all looking at the five-minute charts, or God helpthem, the one-minute charts, or lower. The tick charts even. Maniacs. Iamlooking at the daily and weekly charts here.”
 
Charlie Flank Goes to U.S. National Bank 771
“Should I look at those, too?”
“Sure. Do that. And add in the four-hour charts. Can you do that?”
“Absolutely,” I answered.
Even though everyone here seemed out of touch with the high-techform of trading, I was at least happy that he was talking to me, and alsoaware that if I had studied some before I had met him, I could be askinghim lots of intelligent questions about the market. Right now, I was posi-tively unable to comprehend anything more advanced than his instructionsto look at the long-term charts. Other than that, he was speaking a foreignlanguage. I knew that everyone on Wall Street (except the men at the RestHome for Old Guy Traders) was making trades. I knew that we had justgotten a March Jobs Number, or “NFP.”
“You said that everyone who trades in the short term would be buyingdollars, trading currency. What about stocks?”
“Stocks aren't traded here on the same floor as currencies, usually.Here we can trade whatever we want. The equities floor would be separatefrom the currency floor in most places. But to answer your question,stocks could make a nice move upward today. Stock market likes a strongeconomy.”
I was confused on so many levels. For sure, my brain had melted andwas now draining out my ears.
He could tell I did not understand much of this and that I was totallycaptivated by the chaos on the television. He smiled. “You are a totalrookie, aren’t you?”
Inodded. “With a capital R,” I answered.
He looked down at his charts and looked up at me. Then he lookeddown and up again, trying to decide what he was going to spend his time on.
‘Td love to help you kid,” he said, “but I’ve gotta get myself ready forMonday. It’s nine a.m. and I’m leaving at noon, and I got twenty-five othercharts to work on. It’s not like I was expecting you. Was I expecting you?”
“No.”
“Right. You need to read a book about this stuff.”
Iwas willing to read War and Peace backward if it meant I could betterunderstand what was happening around me.
“What book?”
He shook his head. I guessed that I had asked just a few too manyquestions in too short of a time. “I don’t know,” he told me. “I started in themailroom a thousand years ago and learned this stuff by sitting at a deskand asking a guy questions, like you’re trying to do with me. Come back onMonday and you can bother me some more. My name’s Samuel Wilson.” Hestood up, shook my hand again, and that was the sign that it was time forme to go.
“Thank you, Mr. Wilson. I will do that. I really appreciate this.”
 
  
 
72 ADVENTURES OF A CURRENCY TRADER
He grinned and now looked happy that he had helped me.
Although he couldn’t answer any more questions, I didn’t see why Icouldn't stick around and watch what happened next. He didn’t mind, andhe even said that he’d make sure no one bothered me. I sneaked over to anearby desk that was closer to the CBNC television, and settled in for a lit-tle while. This made me really, really happy. Even if I couldn’t learn muchabout the new methods of trading from this old man, he at least wouldcover for me while I watched some television to see more of the reaction inthe market.
And I wasn’t going to leave here empty-handed.
From just a few moments on this trading floor, I knew about one moreeconomic event that needed my attention: the NFP. I had a lot of studyingto do. It occurred to me, as I saw everyone working furiously on television,that all those people knew what they were doing. They saw that jobs reportcome out, and then they were ready to react. Like tigers pouncing on theirprey. Or bullies on a playground trying to get a piece of a fight. They hadbeen waiting for someone to announce the number, and then