Do I look familiar to you anymore? I appeared on the cover of Forbes Magazine in November 1984, when I was only ten years old. (Pause, deep sigh.) Oh, boy, I guess I’d better start at the beginning ...

On Labor Day, 1976, the Harvard M.B.A. class of 1971 met for its 5 year anniversary at a bar on the river in Cambridge called Sweet Pea, an institution notable for its prevalence of sword ferns and a special price on a particular woman’s drink, a concoction of creme de menthe, cognac, 7Up and half and half. A normally uptight Bain & Company management consultant by the name of Carrie George succeeded to drink four of these Sweet Peas and then put her tongue in the ear of one New York tax accountant Ditman Johnson. Frivolities followed, culminating in an awkward mad heat of pent-up lust being released in the faux-leather passenger seat of Mister Johnson’s Lincoln Town Car, which had been rented that morning from Avis. The moment after, I am to imagine, was an awkward one, windows wet with condensation, and I think Ms. George and Mr. Johnson would never have seen each other again if I hadn’t entered their lives.

Mr. Johnson insisted they get married, of course, and the ceremony was performed by the senior partner of Mr. Johnson’s firm in a deposition room, on a Thursday afternoon. No honeymoon was taken. Ms. George was occupied with the strategic planning for a Frank Lorenzo airline, and Mr. Johnson was putting clients’ money into solar-powered tax shelters. Ms. George took time out between meetings with a Dallas defense contractor to give birth to their son, me, William George-Johnson, at Dallas Memorial Hospital. I weighed four pounds, three ounces—a scrawny undernourished kid who spent his first month in an incubator being fed by a tube and suckling on a button on my flannel hospital gown. When I reached seven pounds my mother flew back to Dallas to sign for me, like a package. She had reserved a seat for me on the return flight, first class, right across the aisle from her. She looked out for my safety by making sure my seat belt was cinched properly. The movie, I believe, was the Poseidon Adventure, starring Ernest Borgnine.

Quite frankly, they just didn’t know what to do with me. This was still several years before the invention of day care. None of their acquaintances were taking time out for children. Ms. George was up for a promotion, and Mr. Johnson was on the fast track to partner. For awhile they gave me free reign of the house, but when I ungratefully vomited my morning bacon omelette on Mr. Johnson’s prized Persian throw rug I was banished to their study, where I spent most of my days and early evenings until I was five. I found ample reading in the study. In addition to the traditional reference books, including the Columbia Encyclopedia and the Oxford Dictionary and the Rand McNally Atlas, there was fun stuff, such as Mister Johnson’s library of corporate 10Ks and annual reports, alphabetized within industry categories, and those ever-appealing Harvard M.B.A. sacraments, Peter Drucker’s Management Theory and Black-Scholes’s Methods of Pricing Options. These latter were Ms. George’s editions, with her hand-printed notations in the margins. I studied her notes incessantly, and in her absences attempted to please her by mastering the items she had underlined. Ms. George was a compulsive underliner. By the age of three I had invented an imaginary alter-personality, Doctor Theodore "The Bear" Michaels, PhD. Teddy was a risk-averse pessimist, and I lectured him on end about long-term portfolio returns. By the age of four I had memorized all of the 10Ks, and when Mr. Johnson brought new ones home I found I could spot ratio variances to the industry average in a matter of seconds. Balance sheets painted pictures for me, recognizable patterns that formed three dimensional "shapes" in my mind. It was like reading Braille—to most they are just little hole punches, but to others they have immediately comprehensible meaning.

When it was time for school, I made some attempt to be like other boys, but I lived a secret life. I would lock myself in the bathroom for hours, sit on the toilet with my pants around my ankles, gazing on the steamy pages of the Wall Street Journal. Ms. George burst in on me once. I managed to get my pants up, but I had no time to wipe the smudged newsprint from my fingers. It was so embarrassing. To be caught by your own mother! Oedipus, I hear you! After that I tried to be better. I spent my allowance on barbeque potato chips and farted in public and dug boogers from my nose while being talked to by my kindergarten teacher, Ms. Pemberton, who wore a wig. But when I was six I discovered a false bottom to Mr. Johnson’s desk drawer, and in the compartment below was a $15,000 bearer bond from the Kern Country Municipal Water District. My own father, with his money in Munis! Paying 4%! How insulting. I lost all faith in him, and I saw him for what he truly was—a sallow, reticent bookkeeper with no instinct for the jungle. I signed the back of the bond and mailed it in to Charles Schwaab with an account application form under Mr. Johnson’s name. I had to be careful, so all transactions were executed by letter. Each day I made some move, and the account grew quickly, roughly 12% per month. When Ms. George brought home an IBM compatible, I partitioned the hard drive and built VisiCalc spreadsheets right under their nose. I received confirms and tax notices at a mail box. By the time the I.R.S. nabbed my father for unreported capital gains, his $15,000 had grown to $42,000, which was enough to get me written up in a 5-column inch story in the tabloid New York Post. "Freak child is Investment Guru!" the headline read, accompanied by a picture of me wearing bottle-thick glasses and bright red suspenders, my hair slicked back with Mr. Johnson’s Vitalis Hair Oil.

The next day there were scouts for the mutual funds hanging around the computer room at P.S. 173. By the end of the week I had offers from several. The pressure to go pro was intense. I chose the Franklin Group of funds, in San Mateo California. They set me up with $50 million, which wasn’t as much as Fidelity offered but it would be under my exclusive control, without any supervision. I got an apartment in Palo Alto, where Ms. George had gone to college, and I began trading in August 1985. I was eight years old.

My methods were straightforward. Scour the quarterly 10Ks, hunt for value. Nothing new. It just came much more naturally to me than others. As it happens, good companies get bought by bigger companies, and I benefitted from the trigger fingers of merger-happy CEOs. However, it is worth pointing out that I was not looking for takeover targets. I was simply finding cheap stock sooner than others. By the end of the year my assets under management had swelled to $600 million. Franklin Fundamentals, as my fund was called, made most of the year-end top 10 ratings lists, which attracted even more cash. At that point, I think I became, rather than one of the market watchers, one of the market players that others watch. Your very own William George-Johnson became known on the street as Billy "The Kid", hotshot extraordinaire. Every hot money manager knows those few short years of omnipotence. You buy Allied Signal. Everyone says, oh, Franklin Fundamentals is buying Allied Signal, it must be about to go up. They buy it, driving the price up 15%. I look like a genius. Forbes puts me on their cover. Some kids master Pac Man.

And then my voice started to crack. Dark hair sprouted on my forearms, and my testicles descended two inches. I was early, no doubt, advanced beyond my years. Power and puberty are an explosive mix. At home, I was cruel and disgusting and ruthless. I hired maids, and ordered them to walk about the apartment in starched blouses and wool trousers. I had a fetish for the sound of heels on kitchen linoleum. Oh, Ms. George! At the office I taunted the market like a bully. My power made me sloppy. It didn’t matter what I bought, my imitators always followed. I had $2.4 billion under management and all I cared about was whether my lunch pizza was delivered warm. I’m telling you, I had gone off the deep end and didn’t know it. September 1987 I decide to prove to the market how powerful I am. I go long on the blue chips at a time when the dollar is falling and inflation is rising. Fuck ‘em, I said. What’s the dollar compared to me! At Franklin, they’re afraid to question my authority. They could have, and should have, and even talked about it in not-so-secret meetings. That was crucial, because after the market crashed and they sued me for reckless endangerment, their own foreknowledge made them culpable. That small catch was enough to get criminal charges dropped, and I walked free after paying only $6 million in restitution. I was eleven years old and had seen it all, done it all, lived the good life, screwed a call girl in a mink coat and attended a Lakers playoff game with Robert DeNiro. Now it was time to crash and burn.

In normal American society there is really no substitute for the supercharged mania of the markets. You can’t go home again, they say. I drifted like a ghost, bored by the ordinariness of human life. I attemped to join the Marines special forces division, but no amount of bribes could get them to overlook the fact that I was 4 feet 3 inches tall, without shoes. However, I did find some new friends, ex-navy S.E.A.L.S. who were in to speedballing heroine and patrolling the Arizona border to extort money from helpless immigrants. I developed a touch of an addiction, and for some reason my teeth became terribly prone to cavities. I visited a dentist in Phoenix each week, was given braces and headgear and a rubber mouthguard for my lower teeth, which was to keep me from grinding during sleep. My dentist had an assistant with soft brown hair and full breasts who wore the same Oil of Olay skin lotion as Ms. George. I fell in love and purchased for her birthday a split-level ranch home. But living with her caused my face to erupt in embarassing red zits, and the stress of having bad skin made my hair greasy. I hated myself and I soon hated her and our union lasted less than a few months. In retrospect, I wonder if it wasn’t something in the air.