When my father had his breakdown he really fell apart. Sat there like a zombie and couldn’t move or say a word.

He used to say confusing things to my brother and me when we were kids.

He’d say, “I may not always be right but I’m never wrong.”

I don’t know if that confused my brother as much as it did me. I sure wanted him to be right about everything. But on my twenty-fifth birthday he just lost it, and that’s when I found out that sometimes he was very wrong. Catastrophically wrong. That was the day he found out he’d lost fifty million dollars. Not all of it his. But a lot of his, and everyone else in the family’s.

When he realized it he just went numb. Then we found out that the doctor he’d been seeing had been mismedicating him and he hadn’t slept for three weeks.

Then we found out that he was bi-polar. In those days they called it manic depressive. Now there are different types of manic depression and I’m no expert on the finer points. But it seemed my dad’s type was the kind that’s triggered by external stress. So of course he chose to run a hedge fund on Wall Street which, as anyone who knows about these types of activities will tell you, is only the highest stakes crap shoot on THE STREET, which is also called by denizens of that world, THE BIG GAME.

So I am here to tell you right now that if you are invested in THE MARKET with anything more than play money, you should know that a great preponderance of people who work down there are drawn to it because they have some sort of mood disorder. Like die-hard gamblers. They go for the rush. The adrenaline flow. And few of them get out in time when they’re winning. It’s an immutable law. And very like a drug.