ABC plucks gifted minority students from poorly financed public schools and places them in boarding schools or public high schools in wealthy suburbs.Almost all the other students in these schools are white and rich, so the ABC students are forced to confront uncomfortable issues of being different at just the point in their lives when teenagers seek comfort in samenessDespite the challenges, the program claims success. Graduates proceed to science- and math-related careers at a far higher rate than do members of minorities overall.

Probably every industry in the country is staffed with ABC's 9,000 alumni. Singer Tracy Chapman is one, as is William Lewis, a Morgan Stanley managing director, and Francisco Borges, a former treasurer of Connecticut.

One ABCalumnus, Arnold Principal, 28, a stockbroker and financial planner, has been coping with issues of mobility and identity-or been surrounded by people coping with them on his behalf--since infancy. That has helped him make it from a crumbling Haiti to an ascendant Wall Street, via Brooklyn, New Canaan High School in Connecticut and Holy Cross in Massachusetts.

And Principal further complicates and enriches his biography by bringing Wall Street to the old neighbourhood. His 100-odd clients call him on an "800" number and probably imagine a Park Avenue office suite, but Principal runs Principal Capital Management out of the brick row house that his mother, Myrienne Jasmin, owns in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. That gives him the financial flexibility to chip in toward the repair of a fire-damaged rental property she owns in Crown Heights.

The family was in the vanguard of the great Caribbean migration that transformed so many of Brooklyn's neighbourhoods. When Arnold Principal's older brother, Quedel, was in thefifth grade at a Crown Heights elementary school, his teacher made it clear to Ms Jasmin that the family could find better schools in a better neighbourhood.

Jasmin, a nurse's aide, made complying with the teacher's guidance her obsession. In one year, using a series of bank loans, she turned the $1,000 she saved working two full-time jobs into $7,000, enough to buy a house in the then mostly Jewish neighbourhood of East Flatbush, where Quedel, Arnold and their sister, Sauveta, would attend the then nearly all-white Meyer Levin Junior High.

Quedel went on to St Paul's School through ABC, then to Stanford and Harvard Law School, and is now a lawyer in Westchester County, NY; Sauveta stayed in the local public schools, graduated from Adelphi University and is now a nurse. And today East Flatbush is nearly all black.

Arnold Principal is nostalgic for the days when "you could go to the corner store without getting shot by a cop"-a nearby market, the Milky Way, was the scene of a police shooting lastChristmas. But he is probably the least qualified person to judge how safe the streets of his own neighbourhood were because he was rarely allowed on them: children were under strict orders to return home immediately after school.

"Who you go with is who you are," Jasmin said, explaining her fear of losing track of her children. As Principal gained more black schoolmates, she invited them over for cake, soda and chips. It was a setup: Observing which ones demanded more food and which ones asked politely, she would say to her son in Creole: "Keep this one; drop this one; keep this one. The ones I tell you to drop, they have no manners; they have no parents after them. The ones I tell you to keep, they have manners; they have parents after them."

She was prescient; some of her picks also went on to A Better Chance, college and professional careers, and they remain Principal's closest friends. Principal graduated third in his class from Meyer Levin but was as shy as he was smart. The ABC house in New Canaanhelped change that; for participants attending public school, the program establishes dormitories that replicate something of the boarding-school experience.

And one of the girls in the family he spent weekends with, Sarah Smith, now a writer for Facts on File in Manhattan, made it her goal to loosen him up. "He was afraid of offending people," she recalled. "I talked a lot, and he listened. Then finally I got him going, too."

The personality that emerged from living in two worlds is not the back-slapping bonhomie of so many stock peddlers, but the truly great salesman's trait of genuinely liking people.

Svelte in a dark blue suit with gleaming black shoes and cuff links shaped like bulls, he is able, in talking about even today's roller-coaster market, to elicit a feeling that nothing would be safer than assigning a nest egg to his care.

While most of Principal's clients are blacks from Brooklyn, he will make cold calls to anyone he thinks has money, and the better part of the assets he manages arethose of white classmates in Connecticut and Massachusetts.

Cash to be invested may be the crudest measure of the career benefit Principal has reaped by injecting himself into the world of privilege, but it is hardly the only one.

Less concrete, but more important, is confidence, the belief that he has every right to circulate among successful people. Recalling his New Canaan days, he said: "You learn to ignore the fact that you are the only black student. You're there to learn and be competitive."