He was twenty-seven and rented the apartment for the window behind him. The suit cost $189, the chain was real, the desk was a folding table cropped out of frame. Two hundred and forty subscribers at $49 a month, most of them in Ohio, most of them men who worked early. He posted the winners. The app that tracked the losers he had deleted in February.

On Sunday nights he took the subscription money and put it on his own picks, under a different name, because he wanted to know. By March he was down eleven thousand and up to three hundred subscribers. He was extremely good at sounding certain. It never occurred to him that the men paying him and the man losing to those same picks were one kind of person.