Non-Stop Reads: Vadim Babenko – Stories Behind My Books: Forex and Review

Saturday, June 22, 2013

Vadim Babenko – Stories Behind My Books: Forex and Review

Semmant by Vadim Babenko
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

How did the main character feel during the book? Give evidences of this.

He was moody. Never satisfied. Unhappy. Driven to work. Changed jobs and women repeatedly.

What did the title have to do with the book?

The robot's name was Semmant. Sometimes, I felt that even Bogdan was slave to his invention.

Tell in your own words the beginning of the book

The beginning was about Bogdan and his graphic descriptions of the nurses - who he had slept with and for how long.

Disclosure: I received a review copy of this book from the author.

View all my reviews

Stories behind my books: Forex

by Vadim Babenko

It all started when I lost money. A lot of money – enough to last a modest family for a couple of years.

This happened in a flash – I decided to double my bank account and began to play the currency market, having neither experience nor skill. In the first two transactions luck was on my side, then I laid down a big stake and was soon staring in shock and disbelief at the computer screen. The market, on a strange whim, had lurched in the opposite direction, and I was falling further and further into the red. Then everything was over; no money was left. It had simply evaporated in a matter of hours.

I didn’t tell anybody about it. On the contrary, I pretended I was doing great. Better than before – though, in reality, I was overwhelmed by a sense of catastrophe. I had something to live on – previous investments produced income – but the issue was not the money. The specter of terrible defeat closed in on me from all corners – and I could not accept defeat. So I began to look for ways to win back what had been lost in the market.

Fortunately, I didn’t start taking risks again right away – though I was very much tempted. I forced myself to observe and think, almost to meditate, as I studied price charts. Then I realized I wasn’t able to control my emotions, even on small stakes. I understood I needed a partner with a sober head and iron nerves. I set aside all my affairs, including the book I had just begun, and started making an automated trader – this concept had just become fashionable at the time. Recalling my past, the twelve years I had dedicated to AI, I set out to design an exceptionally clever computer program. It was a robot – my accomplice in fighting the market. I called him SEMMANT.

For over a year I did nothing else. I worked tirelessly, as in a fever. The robot grew smarter – I really put a great deal into him. Its artificial mind became a logically closed circuit, self-sufficient, personally complete. It even seemed to me that in its actions, its reactions to market fluctuations could be seen something human, something of mine. At a certain moment I understood I had given him all I could. He could be made no better; he resisted all changes.

Here the money I had lost came back to me – one of the stocks I had owned for a while suddenly tripled over speculative news. I felt at once that the financial markets no longer interested me. My robot remained on a computer disk, like in a dungeon, alone with a virtual account. I just couldn’t set him free to trade in real money. I probably subconsciously did not want him to experience the same fate – terrible failure, defeat, catastrophe.

I tried to tell others about him, but they laughed at me. All the same, I knew I had won a victory. I became incredibly free, casting a heavy burden from my shoulders. And I returned to the abandoned text, to the new book hidden in a desk drawer. I wrote with pleasure, many hours a day. No, this was not SEMMANT. This was a different novel: SEMMANT had yet to mature in my mind. For a year, two, three, five.