Cohen: I spent about a dozen years at the Chicago Board of Trade as a wire service reporter covering the markets for a number of news organizations. I wrote for Crain's Chicago Business, Time magazine and the Financial Times of London. I learned, as you might expect, a lot about the markets, agriculture, and the lives of traders.

Interviewer: How did you end up at the Chicago Board of Trade?

Cohen: I had been a reporter in Buenos Aires for about a year. I was working out of the United Press International office in BA, covering economics and food production for Knight-Ridder Financial, a wire service that was then headquartered in Miami. After a year down there, I was offered a position at the exchange.

Interviewer: What was it like working at the exchange?

Cohen: Very different from any other beat a reporter might have. I showed up at the place around 8:30 am and immediately went down to the floor to check for news and opinion. I had to prepare, like all the other reporters, an opening call--forecast--for the markets, which opened at 9:30 am. We checked overnight news, talked to the traders and desk managers on the floor, went back upstairs, and filed our stories to a copy desk. A real cast down there--guys in the pits taking five-minute positions, position traders holding on to their trades for weeks and months, the food processing traders hedging positions, exchange officials, everyone.

Interviewer: Did you know anything about futures before you got there?

Cohen: Not really. It was all very baffling for several weeks. I was shocked by the uproar that started at 9:30, when trading began in each individual trading pit. I remember attending afternoon classes the exchange sponsored to educate the public; the instructor was a trader I knew on the floor. I was always amazed by John Kissane, our bureau chief. John had been following commodities markets for years and years. All he had to do was follow prices on a TV screen in his office to know what was happening--that instinctive feel you develop after long experience with a futures market.

Interviewer: Big stories?

Cohen: Well, the core of market reporting is. . .market reporting. Describing how the markets are behaving day to day and why. But the Hunt family of Texas tried to corner the soybean market and provoked a sensational enforcement action by the Commodities Futures Trading Commission. I still remember the federal trial judge, a courtly elderly man named Frank McGarr. I am a bit embarrassed by a memory of having pestered him in his office about when a decision was expected; it was a bench trial. The Hunts lost a fortune in the silver market a few years later. I also remember the lawyers in the enforcement division of the Chicago office of the Chicago Futures Trading Commission, people who were still learning their trade. The CFTC was not all that old, as regulatory commissions go, and the staff had a learning curve to get past.

Interviewer: Are the characters in the novel based on people you knew at the exchange?

Cohen: Not really, though some of the action derives from true events. Amy, the market reporter, is pure invention. Tom, the unemployed financial analyst, derives from a number of people I knew in banking from my years on LaSalle Street. Vladimir, the Russian mathematician, is a composite image of many Russian-Jewish immigrants I knew several years ago. I taught English as a Second Language for some years to supplement my income, and Rogers Park, where the students lived, had a very large Russian population back then. There was a period of my life when I thought I was spending more time with immigrants than with native English speakers! Virtually all of the places in the novel exist or existed, such as the Surf restaurant, which was a small diner in the western corner of the Loop.

Interviewer: Where did the idea for the novel come from?

Cohen: I was preparing a piece on trading techniques for a publication and began reading Peter Bernstein's book Against the Gods, a very fine account of forecasting and the history of assessing risk. He has a chapter on Fibonacci, the first time I had heard of the name. At the same time, I read a profile of John LeCarré. According to the story, he resigned from the British Security Service around 1963 and banged out The Spy Who Came in from the Cold in six weeks. I felt encouraged to convert my piece on trading into a novel, but it took me far longer than six weeks--closer to 18 months.

Interviewer: Before I let you go, I can't help but ask: Have you ever traded futures yourself?

Cohen: Never. Reporters were prohibited from trading. When I left the exchange a few years ago, I gave a little thought to the subject. I knew an excellent analyst named Ed Taylor who was from southern Illinois. Ed managed accounts for friends, and I had a lot of confidence in him. But I knew quite well by then how risky the activity is, and I never ventured any money in it. Trading options and equities has always seemed more manageable.

David Cohen was born in St. Louis and graduated from the University of California at Berkeley. He has written for a number of news organizations, including The Financial Times of London, Time magazine and several conservation publications. His interest in the markets stems from the years he spent as a futures and general assignment business reporter in Chicago. He has also lived in and written from Taiwan, Argentina, and Moscow. His website, Editorialnote.net, includes a large collection of essays as well as samples of his journalism. He currently lives in suburban Chicago.