Peter Fischer enjoyed his new life at the campus of Washington University in St. Louis, where he was studying for an MBA. As an older student of thirty-four, he appreciated the student life of studying, reading, and meeting pretty girls. It was exciting unlocking the secrets of the stock market and by the time he finished his degree in 1983 he would become a “Master of the Universe,” one of those stock market gurus.

People on campus who knew him thought of him as different because of his strong German accent and the fact that he had fled the communist East, where he had been a physicist at a fiber institute in Magdeburg, East Germany. He did not learn English until the summer before he started classes in 1981. He used to brag that he made 65 percent on the English section of the GMAT (Graduate Management Admission Test) after a semester of studying English and that he knew all the words in the dictionary. There was no question that he was a very intelligent man with an “amazing memory.” He had recently grown a mustache and his blond hair had become shaggy, framing his warm brown eyes. Handsome and affable, he had a muscular, athletic build and usually wore T-shirts and jeans and looked like most of the other American college students.