The oil stocks zip up and down tempting and tormenting Michael W. Harper as much of Los Angeles is just starting to wake up.

“Buy 1,000 Exxon at the market,” Harper tells his assistant.

“Sell 1,500 Exxon, market,” Harper says a moment later.

The trading day is 10 minutes old when a colleague quips, “I should have just gone to the break room.”

“I’ve got Exxon and Amoco acting terrible,” replies Harper, who soon finds himself down about $1,500.

Harper is a specialist, one of the 42 master traders who work on the floor of the Pacific Exchange downtown.

Specialists play a key role in the operation of the exchange. They provide a service by processing stock orders from buyers and sellers free of charge. And they help maintain an active market while making a living on the margins of their own trades.

The qualifications are a mix of those possessed by a tactician, soothsayer and riverboat gambler. The blessed reap six-figure annual incomes, while the less fortunate face financial ruin and a career in a more forgiving arena.

Harper already has monitored the morning’s financial news by the time he arrives at the exchange at 5:45 a.m. He spends the next 45 minutes before the market opens organizing stock orders and culling bits of information that portend movement of the 65 stocks he primarily trades.

By 6 a.m., specialists and their assistants have filled much of the trading room with its banks of computers and wall-mounted electronic bulletin boards that display the latest financial news in rivers of green letters. Talking heads in overhead monitors deliver the morning’s financial news.

At 50, Harper is one of the elder statesmen of the exchange. He looks bookish with his wire-rim glasses and thinning brown hair. He wears the uniform of the floor: dress shirt, slacks and a tie, always a tie. The Pacific Exchange slaps the tie-less with a $250 fine.

A senior vice president at Wedbush Morgan Securities Inc., Harper supervises three assistants who help him with his deals and make their own. Their fortunes are tied, sharing in each other’s gains and losses.

This morning, the specialist is looking for gold, black gold. The news is that gasoline supplies are at the lowest level in two years, says Harper, who anticipates a jump in oil stocks.

The market opens with a 79-point upswing but quickly takes a dive along with Harper’s fortunes.

The specialist scans his monitor for the latest movement of his stocks. He punches his keyboard and maneuvers his trackball to call up more information. Graphs flash across monitors charting the peaks and valleys of a particular stock and various markets stocks, bonds and futures. Movement in bonds and futures reverberate in Harper’s market.

It is an unexpectedly active morning, but still, there is none of the commotion a layman might expect.

Here, within the mauve and tan walls of the understated trading room, a voice is seldom raised. Gone are the days of traders and clerks scurrying about in a frenzy. The computer is king, and deals are transacted in seconds with a few strokes of a keyboard.

Harper is trying to pick up a trend, but the market is devilishly unpredictable. The value of futures sink and, in a flash, Harper is on a selling binge, issuing orders to assistants in a clear and smooth voice befitting a librarian. All the while, he is planning on buying back the same stock when the time is right.

“There’s a big battle going on here between the bears and the bulls,” says Harper. ” This is what we call a whipsaw market. There’s no trend. If you get on the wrong side, you’re in trouble.”

The specialist continues buying and selling, re-buying and re-selling oil, utilities and other stock. Harper tries to “chop” out the slimmest of margins, often times measured in “teenies,” slang for one-sixteenth of a point. He seldom leaves his seat, where he sits elbow to elbow with his assistants.

Harper, a 20-year veteran, now considers himself a conservative trader, never sticking out his neck too far. The 1987 crash taught him a quick lesson in temperance. Harper says he suffered a seven-figure loss, but quickly recouped much of the hit with six-figure gains in the days that followed.

Now, the specialist considers a $25,000 gain an excellent day’s work, and a $5,000 loss a bad showing.

“Because I don’t make as much as a lot of people, I don’t have bad days,” Harper says.

On this day, in this type of market, Harper is content to make a couple of hundred dollars here and a few hundred there.

“That was a good trade,” Harper says late in the morning. “I sold and bought back and made $250 in 10 minutes, but you never know.”

Harper has experienced his share of ups and downs and counts composure as an ally. Throughout the day, Harper’s only visible concession to stress, if any, is chewing gum. He doesn’t yell. He doesn’t sweat. But after work, Harper will go to the gym to unwind. And his hobby is coaching a high school softball team.

“I’ve been over the stress part,” said Harper, an Arcadia resident and father of two grown children. “You’ve just been through it so many times. If the market’s off 200 points, you’ve been through it. It’s not the end of the world.”

The trading day is 10 minutes away from its 1 p.m. close. Harper is still turning deals at a stiff pace. Squeeze out a teeny here, another there. The market ends up disappointing Harper and other traders. The Dow Industrial Average finishes down 32.52 points from the previous day.

“I have problems,” a nearby trader yells at the close.

“Yeah, we all do,” says another from a distance.

Harper says nothing, setting up his moves for a new day.

The specialist figures he eked out about $2,500. At times, Harper says, he had more than $1 million tied up. All in all, not a bad showing on a day when the whipsaw market closed down, he says.

But Harper looks forward to better prospecting tomorrow.

“Each day’s different,” he concludes. “Because of that it doesn’t get boring.”