Still, he was a 29-year-old earning $200,000 a year, and he was, as he puts it, "ramping up the lifestyle." Rival firms noticed his success: He left Bear Stearns for Dean Witter, which would later become Morgan Stanley. Blaine’s business grew to the point where he became somewhat famous. Name a prominent director or big-time movie star, and there was a fair chance that Blaine Lourd was giving her financial advice. He lived near the beach in Malibu, drove fancy cars, and indulged an expensive taste for young women who had moved to Los Angeles to become movie stars. He routinely ranked in the top 10 percent of revenue producers for whichever firm he happened to be working for. In his best years, he grossed more than $1 million. His father had been right: His persuasiveness and ability to get people to like him went far on Wall Street.

Only now he had a problem. He was quickly becoming the world's unhappiest man. He often woke up with a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach; more often, he woke up with a hangover. Like a lot of his fellow stockbrokers, he started drinking too much. "Everyone I worked with had a drinking issue," he says. "Or a drug issue. You can't continually hurt people and feel good about yourself." One day, he woke up to find he was a 37-year-old late-1990s cliché: the self-loathing Wall Street salesman. He wondered what had gone wrong and began mining his journal to write a memoir. His book, which was influenced in part by a 1940 financial-industry critique, would relate the sadness of his father's financial collapse, the sorrow of leaving home, and the sordidness of his financial career:

The sole function of a stockbroker/financial consultant/investment counselor is to get customers. So how does a stockbroker go about getting customers? The best way is to be born rich. Rich guys make good stockbrokers because generally they are lazy and so can do little harm to the client’s long-term financial well-being by trading in the game of chance. The next best way is to circulate among them and to convince them with a pleasing personality that you have the ability to buy everything before the big rise—and to sell everything before the big decline.

I was not rich.

One day, someone may look back and ask: At the end of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st, how did so many take up financial careers on Wall Street that were of such little social value? Just now, the markets are roiling, money managers and investment banks are reporting disappointing returns, and people are beginning to wonder if they chose the wrong guy in Greenwich, Connecticut, to take 2 percent of their assets and 20 percent of profits. But what if the problem isn’t the guy in Greenwich but the idea that makes him possible: the belief that the best way to invest capital is to hand it to an expert? As a group, professional money managers control more than 90 percent of the U.S. stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole, minus whatever fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more. Twenty-five years ago, the most successful among them took home a few million dollars a year; in 2006, more than 100 money managers made more than $100 million, and a handful made more than $1 billion. A vast industry of stockbrokers, financial planners, and investment advisers skims a fortune for themselves off the top in exchange for passing their clients’ money on to people who, as a group, cannot possibly outperform the market.

For Blaine Lourd, American stockbroker, the mere fact that he landed in the middle of this industry and became a success was reason enough to hate himself. But in Santa Monica, as Blaine twisted himself into ever more intricate knots to disguise his inability to pick winning stocks or money managers, his antithesis was rising. It was a firm founded in 1981 on a simple idea: Nobody knows. Nobody knows which stock is going to go up. Nobody knows what the market as a whole is going to do, not even Warren Buffett. A handful of people with amazing track records isn’t evidence that people can game the market. Nobody knows which company will prove a good long-term investment. Even Buffett’s genius lies more in running businesses than in picking stocks. But in the investing world, that is ignored. Wall Street, with its army of brokers, analysts, and advisers funneling trillions of dollars into mutual funds, hedge funds, and private equity funds, is an elaborate fraud.