An excerpt from Fortune magazine, February 9, 2001:

Exactly a year ago, FORTUNE looked at the bizarre world of day traders like Adam Mesh, an unshaven, T-shirt-clad 24-year-old who, in just one day, bought and sold nearly 10,000 shares of a company he’d never heard of before. (See “Meet the New Market Makers” in the fortune.com archive.) Today, not only is Mesh still at Tradescape, but he and three partners have formed their own firm, Chimera Capital, hiring 45 associates as proprietary traders. Mesh and his partners provide the initial capital stake and then split any eventual profits with the firm’s even younger newcomers, many of whom are recent grads of the University of Michigan, Mesh’s alma mater. This unlikely fraternity (so far they’re all male, although Mesh insists they’d be thrilled to find a female trader) now possess roughly $2 million in capital and recently traded more than 5 million shares on a single day.

Evan Seidenstein was still in Ann Arbor last spring when he decided to join Mesh’s group, even though he had interviewed for positions with traditional firms like Salomon Smith Barney. “I knew that if I didn’t give it a shot I would regret it for the rest of my life,” says Seidenstein, who has eked out a gain for the past 62 straight trading days. The profits aren’t huge–$2,000 to $4,000 a day–but they should enable Seidenstein to earn more than he would if he had taken a job as a junior number cruncher on Wall Street.

Of course, making money as a day trader is a lot harder than it seems when you’re hanging around kids like Seidenstein (see box). The learning curve for a day trader is steep, Mesh says. Five of his traders are still down $30,000 each after their first few months, but he remains confident that they will eventually catch on and recoup their losses.

Keep in mind that article was from 2001, so Adam could now be very rich (or possibly not so rich due to our economy). Should be interesting to see Melana’s reaction during the finale when she learns of Adam’s financial success.