Friday at 9:42 in the morning, Pacific time, I sold everything. I'm writing the time down because I want to remember it. I didn't wait for a bounce. I didn't set a limit a quarter above the bid. I hit the button, and the account went to cash, and I closed the laptop and went and stood in the backyard with the sprinkler going.

The numbers, because I owe them to anyone who read this page in August and thought I knew something:

Put in since March: $52,000 of our savings (what Lisa and I called the house fund), $20,000 drawn on the home equity line, $8,000 in cash advances on a credit card.
Left in the account Friday: $19,316.
Lost: a little over sixty thousand dollars, plus six months of a salary I walked away from.

The Nasdaq is near 2,800. The market went up this year. I went down. That's the part I keep trying to explain to myself and can't.

Somebody e-mailed to tell me the IRS will let me deduct three thousand dollars a year in losses. At that rate we'll be square around 2019. Owen will be 27.

I called my old boss Thursday. I start back a week from tomorrow, Monday, October 4, as a project engineer. Less than I made before, and a different desk, and he said, "Glad you got that out of your system," and I said, "Me too," and neither of us believed me.

Lisa hasn't decided anything about us yet. She says she'll know more after a few more Wednesdays with the counselor. She's sleeping in our room. I'm on the couch, which is fair. This morning Owen came out and lay down on the floor next to the couch with his dinosaur book and didn't ask me anything, just read to me about the Cretaceous. I'm going to remember that longer than the numbers.

First session with the counselor. Lisa found her through the employee assistance program at her school. An office park off Howe Avenue, a box of Kleenex on every flat surface, a painting of a sailboat that I stared at for most of an hour.

She asked me to describe a good trading day. I told her about the week in August. I got excited telling it. I could hear it in my voice, and I could see Lisa hear it, and the counselor let me go all the way to the end before she asked, very quietly, "And how did it feel on the bad days?"

I said, "Like I needed a good day."

She wrote something down. Later she used the word "gambling," not like an accusation, just like a word, and I felt my face go hot. I'm an engineer. I had charts. I had a system. I had stop-losses, which I then didn't honor. I don't know what to call it yet. She says I don't have to know yet. She says the main thing is that I stopped.

Driving home Lisa said, "You looked happy, talking about August." I said I know. She said, "I haven't seen you look like that at me in a while." Then we didn't talk the rest of the way.

Lisa knows.

Saturday I took Owen to soccer and forgot that Saturday is the one day the mail comes while I'm out. The home equity statement was on the kitchen table when we got back, opened, squared up neatly with the corners even, the way she does with Owen's report cards. Twenty thousand dollars, drawn August 23, with a copy of the check in my handwriting.

I told her the rest. All of it. The broker statements in the banker's box in the garage under my old drainage calcs. The credit card. The margin call. The fact that the deal we made in March (six months, and if I'm not bringing home my old salary by September, I go back) came and went on September 15 and I just kept going and didn't say anything.

She didn't yell. I would honestly have preferred yelling. She asked me three questions, all of them good ones, and I didn't have a good answer for any of them. Then she went and sat in the car in the driveway for an hour with the radio on. When she came back in she said, "I'm going to find us somebody to talk to." Us. I'm holding onto that word.

Didn't trade today. Watched CNN instead, all those cars jammed on the interstates out of Florida and Georgia and the Carolinas, everybody trying to get out of the way of something enormous coming toward them. I sat in the spare room and watched it for three hours with the Level II screen dark. I know the feeling. I just haven't gotten in the car.

Met the margin call. Here is how, and I'm writing it down so I can't pretend later it was fine. I took an $8,000 cash advance on the credit card that comes in my name only. I sold two positions at a loss to cover the rest. I wired the money in at lunchtime so it would clear before the deadline.

Then I got the mail out of the box before Lisa got home from school, which I've been doing every weekday since the end of August, when things started going the other way. The broker statements go in a banker's box in the garage, under a stack of my old drainage drawings. I have become a man who hides mail in a box in the garage. I'm typing that sentence and I still don't quite believe it's about me.

Owen asked tonight at dinner why I'm home all the time now but never come outside. I said Daddy is working. He said, "On what?" Seven years old. Better question than anybody on the trading message boards has asked me all year.

Margin call. Maintenance call, technically. The phone rang at 7:05 a.m. and a very polite young man from the broker's margin department told me my equity had dropped below the maintenance requirement and I needed to deposit $11,400 by Friday or they would start selling my positions for me, at whatever the market felt like paying.

I've read about margin calls. I've written about them on this page, in March, in a smug little paragraph about "risk management." Here is the thing nobody tells you: it isn't dramatic. It's a polite voice at 7:05 in the morning, and a number, and a day of the week.

The worst part is I knew. Last month they raised the maintenance requirement on the networking stock to fifty percent because it was so volatile. I read the notice. I thought, that's for other people. I added more on the dip. I averaged down, which is the thing every single book tells you not to do, in bold, sometimes in a box.

OK. OK. Bad day. The networking stock (my biggest position, and on margin) warned after the close last night that the quarter will come in light, and it opened this morning down almost a third. There was no chance to get out. There was no bid. It just gapped.

Still up for August! Still up for the month. I have to keep saying that. This is what the pros call a drawdown. You don't panic in a drawdown. You stay disciplined. I'm holding it. It's a great company with a great product, it's a two-day overreaction, and when it comes back I want to be in it. I'm sleeping on it. Well. Lying down next to it.

Made a decision this morning that I think is going to change everything. We have a home equity line we opened two years ago for the kitchen and never used. I drew $20,000 and wired it into the account. With margin that's forty thousand more in buying power. Doing the math on last week's returns with twice the size is honestly a little scary, in the good way!

Haven't told Lisa. She's got her first week of school prep, the new class, all of that, and she worries. I'll show her the statement at the end of September when it's already doubled. It'll be a surprise. It'll be the kitchen, for real this time.

TWENTY-THREE THOUSAND DOLLARS. IN ONE WEEK.

I am going to write this calmly. I am not going to write it calmly. This week I made more than half of what I used to make in a YEAR designing storm drains. Monday I caught the networking stock breaking out on volume right at the open. Tuesday I scalped the Internet incubator stock eleven times for an eighth to a quarter a pop. Wednesday I just rode everything. Thursday everything I touched went green. Today I sold into strength at 12:58, two minutes before the close, and went and picked up Owen from day camp with the windows down playing "Smooth" so loud the camp counselor gave me a look.

The Level II screen is like reading music now. You can see who's lying. You can see the big buyer hiding behind the little orders. Eleven years I sat in a cubicle doing drainage calcs and all along THIS is what my brain was built for.

Took Lisa to dinner at the good steak place. She kept asking if we could afford it. I said, Lisa. Honey. We can afford it.

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