Chapter Five: The Bankrupt Gambler's Public Book

Boundary Tide did not connect the free feeds. Tang sealed them inside an isolated server. After seventy-two hours, he found carefully altered orders mixed into the data. Ninety-nine point nine percent matched the real market. The remaining tenth of one percent happened to magnify the Crowding Fracture Factor's returns. A backtest on the poisoned feed jumped from seventeen percent a year to sixty-three. It was the perfect record with which to lift a new firm onto a pedestal, then kill it with the fall. Han performed the next step for them. At Polaris's annual client conference, he displayed the sixty-three-percent curve and accused Lu of fundraising with “alternative data of unknown origin.” He proposed a five-day live contest.