True, many other firms had done the same kind of trade. "Bur we could finance better," an employee of Long-Term noted. "LTCM was really a financing house." Long-Term preferred to reap a sure nickel than to gamble on making an uncertain dollar, because it could leverage its tiny margins like a high-volume grocer, sucking up nickel after nickel and multiplying the process thousands of times. Of course, not even a nickel her was absolutely sure. And as Steinhardt, the fund manager, had recently been reminded, the penalty for being wrong is infinitely greater when you arc leveraged. But in 1994, Long-Term was almost never wrong. In fact, nearly every trade it touched turned to gold. Long-Term dubbed its safest bets convergence trades, because the instruments matured at a specific date, meaning that convergence appeared to be a sure thing. Others were known as relative value trades, in which convergence was expected but not guaranteed.''·