by Stephen Frey
The portfolio manager in Omaha may not have learned anything bad about XYZ Co. He may have dumped the shares simply because he had liquidity issues at his mutual fund—a decision unrelated to anything that’s going on at XYZ. But it doesn’t matter to the day trader. All that matters to him is that he’s suddenly underwater. If he’s used margin lending to increase his position and the stock price hasn’t rebounded by the end of the day, he’ll have to pay the piper at the closing bell. And if he doesn’t voluntarily pay the piper, his Seaver equivalent will make him pay—or shut him down. The stock might pop right back into its range the next day, but it doesn’t matter to the day trader. He’s already shit out of luck.
The most important thing to understand is that the odds are stacked heavily against the individual in the stock market. But most people don’t get that, or they choose to ignore it. It’s exciting—for a while. Then reality sets in.
It’s almost three o’clock and I’m heading for the men’s room—only a couple of hours until Vincent stops by Bedford to pick me up and we head to the Oriole game in Baltimore to meet his high-roller buddies. When I enter, Daniel is standing in front of the mirror, staring at himself. He doesn’t acknowledge me as I come through the door and move to a urinal. When I go to the sinks, he still hasn’t moved. “You all right?” I ask.
No answer.
“Daniel?”
He turns his head slowly to look at me. His face is pale. “I never thought it would be like this, Augustus,” he says. “I thought I could win. I got great grades at Georgetown, but I didn’t see any point in sticking around. It wasn’t getting me anywhere and I wanted to make some bucks in the real world.”
“Sit down, Daniel,” I say gently, leading him slowly by the arm to lean against a wall. He looks like he might need medical attention. “Take it easy.”
“No,” he says, flailing at me suddenly when he feels the wall against his back.
“Relax.”
“Get off me!”
“All right, all right,” I say quietly, not wanting to agitate him any further.
“I need money,” he blurts out. “You’ve got to lend me some.”
“Daniel, I—”
“Please.”
“I—”
“I know you made a bunch of cash on that tip you gave Mary a few days ago. The one you wouldn’t share with the rest of us.”
“That was wrong,” I say. But I don’t really think so. Who I choose to give information to is my business. But if that’s what Daniel needs to hear me say right now, I’ll say it. “I should have told everyone in the group. If I ever have information like that again, I promise I’ll share it with you.”
“That’s so nice of you,” he says sarcastically, “but it doesn’t help me right now.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Lend me ten grand,” he replies, as if that amount of money is nothing to me. “That’s all I need,” he says, his voice desperate. “Just ten grand, Augustus. I’ll pay you back in a few weeks. If I’m not back in the black by then, I’ll call my parents and ask them for the money. They’ve got plenty of dough.”
“Why don’t you go to your parents now?” I’m standing very close to him, and I notice a small vial in his shirt pocket, but I can’t see exactly what’s inside it. Looks like white pills—probably the ones he was popping this morning—but I can’t tell. “If you’re in trouble, they’ll help.”
Daniel reaches for the ring protruding from his eyebrow, then pulls on it hard enough to make me cringe. “My father is my last resort. He’s such an asshole.”
“You should talk to him any—”
“Lend me the money, Augustus,” Daniel interrupts. “I know you’ve got it. I saw the way Mary was jumping up and down in her cubicle the other day. That wasn’t any ten percent pop. That was a big win.”
“I can’t lend you the money, Daniel.”
It’s strange. I’m willing to give Father Dale and ultimately someone I don’t even know ten thousand dollars, but I won’t lend this kid the same amount even though I can clearly see the desperation in his eyes. We haven’t talked much since I’ve been at Bedford, but Daniel was helpful my first few days, showing me around and making me feel comfortable. So why won’t I lend him the money? I was a kid not too long ago. I know how things are when your father takes about as much interest in you as he does in cleaning the garage. And it isn’t that I don’t believe Daniel when he says his parents will repay me. Beneath his purple-haired, body-pierced facade, he’s got a silver spoon way about him, like he’s always had a safety net when he really needed it. Georgetown University isn’t exactly cheap either.
“Come on.”
“No.” Someone has to teach the kid a lesson. Someone has to teach him that life isn’t always fair. That there won’t always be someone around to pick up the pieces for him when he’s in trouble.
“Please,” Daniel begs. “Seaver’s going to shut me down if I don’t come up with rent. He told me that last night.”
“Call home.”
“You asshole!” Daniel shouts, clenching his fists. “You’re as cheap as my father! I oughta kick your ass.”
“Easy, Daniel,” I snap, rising up to my full height as a warning. He’s six inches shorter and seventy pounds lighter than I am, and I could knock him into next week with one blow to his purple head.
“You and Mary!” Tears of anger stream down his face. “You both have plenty of money, and you won’t lend me a dollar. Goddamn it! That isn’t right. Fuck both of you!”
“Shut up!” People out on the floor might hear him and I don’t want to get involved in something ugly that everyone will be talking about for weeks. I’m trying to keep a low profile—without much success.
“How about five grand?” he pleads. “Just five, Augustus. That’ll tide me over. It’s only a temporary thing. Just a bad streak. That’s my problem.”
“Your problem is that you came here in the first place. Georgetown is a great school. You should have graduated and thanked God that your parents were willing to send you there.”
“Don’t judge me.”
“Go back to school. Admit that this wasn’t the right thing for you.”
“Screw you!”
Out of nowhere he takes a swing at me, but whatever’s in that vial has severely retarded his motor skills. I block his punch easily, then grab him by his collar and lift him off the ground until his feet are way off the bathroom tile. The whole thing takes no more than a split second, and I can tell by the terror in his eyes that he’s never been in a real fight. Maybe it was the drugs that caused him to act so foolishly, but at this point I don’t care.
“Let me go,” he gasps.
“Stop struggling!”
I’ve never been trained to fight; it’s just always come naturally to me. Go for the throat and they’ll give up fast. And so he does.
“Here’s what I’m going to do,” I say, not even breathing hard as I set him down. He hunches over, hands on his knees. “I’m going to lend you the five thousand, but I want it back two weeks from today. If you don’t repay me, I will get it from you.” I push his shoulders against the wall and make sure he’s looking me straight in the eye so he’s absolutely certain of my conviction. “If you skip out on me, I’ll find you and it won’t be pretty when I do. Do you understand?”
He nods.
“All right. I’ll give you a check in the morning. You can tell Seaver he’ll have his money then.”
“Okay,” Daniel whispers. “Thanks.” He lurches past me and heads for the door.
“Two weeks,” I call after him, but he’s already gone.
Daniel isn’t anywhere on the trading floor when I emerge from the men’s room a few moments later after splashing cold water on my face. I’m worried about him, but I don’t have much time to think about it because it’s almost three thirty. I’ve been researching companies all day in case Vincent’s people grill me on my investing strategy, but I still want to review
specifics on a few more stocks before he gets here.
Vincent said his pals might kick in as much as ten million, if I made that three hundred thousand dollars he gave me this past Monday hum. Fortunately, I have. Like a hive of pissed-off hornets. In three days I’ve turned three hundred grand into four hundred grand. That ought to impress them.
Monday afternoon I bought three hundred thousand dollars’ worth of put options on a small pharmaceutical company that went public two months ago. Put options are a cheap way of betting that a company’s stock price will fall. They enable you to force the seller of the options to buy shares of the underlying stock from you at some specific future date for a predetermined “strike” price. If the market price subsequently falls after you buy the puts from him, then you can purchase shares at the low market price and force him to buy them from you at the higher strike price—or “put” them to him—even though the market price is lower.
Which is exactly what I did.
I found out that the management team of the pharmaceutical company had done a great job of negotiating their “lock up” provision with the investment banking firm that took them public two months ago. A lock up provision is a standard requirement in an underwriting agreement that bars all employees and other insiders of a going-public company from selling any of their shares for a specific period of time after the IPO—almost always 180 days. The investment bankers make management sign the lock up provision because they don’t want their preferred clients—the ones they sold the IPO shares to—to see insiders dumping shares right after the IPO. Insider selling isn’t generally regarded as a good sign. After all, if management thought their company was so great, why would they be selling? That could cause the preferred clients to dump the stock—and the price to tank, And brokerage firms never want to see prices tank, especially right after the IPO.
This management team must have had a very sharp lawyer because they negotiated a ninety-day lock up provision—half as long as the normal 180-day period. After those ninety days, they and all the other employees would be free to trade. But the market wasn’t widely aware of that. I found all this out by combing through the company’s IPO document, called an S-1, and I knew there was an opportunity. The company was small and not well known, the lock up period was short, and most companies’ stock prices take a hit as the normal 180-day lock up period comes close to ending. Investors figure the rank-and-file employees will want liquidity to buy homes and cars, so the price tends to drift down with about two weeks to go before the lock up expires.
I bought the puts on Monday, then started alerting the market to the unusually short lock up period by blasting that information out on the company’s Yahoo! chat page. Sure enough, the price dropped eight bucks, and I made a hundred grand in two days. The Internet is fantastic—and Vincent’s high rollers ought to be very happy.
“Up for a beer tonight?” Roger asks as I sit down in my cubicle.
“Can’t,” I say brusquely. As I’ve gotten closer to my self-imposed day trading launch date, I’ve become less chatty with everybody—even Mary.
“Why not?” he wants to know, leaning on the cubicle wall.
“Busy.”
“Doing what?”
I take a deep breath and count to ten. As I feared, Roger has turned into my second shadow, constantly wanting to know what I’m doing with my portfolio, where I’m going for lunch, or if the insurance policy he thinks my mother left me has paid off yet. “I’m going to the Oriole game over in Baltimore.”
“Great! You got an extra ticket?”
“Why don’t you go home early and give your wife some attention?”
“Trust me, the game would be a lot more fun.”
“Well, it’s not my call. Someone’s taking me.” I’m sure Vincent will have at least one extra ticket, or would be able to get his hands on one by the time we made it to Baltimore. After all, he’s Vinnie the Ticket Guy. But I don’t want Roger screwing things up for me in front of the high rollers. I’ve gotten pretty juiced about managing other people’s money. In fact, if tonight works out I’m going to look into buying that new car over the weekend. A BMW, I’ve decided. I can’t believe I’m thinking about a car as expensive as that, but what the hell, you only go around once. “Sorry, Roger.”
“Who’s taking you?” he digs.
“An old friend.” My voice is on edge. The clock’s ticking, and I want to make certain I’ve nailed this research before Vincent gets here.
“Who?”
“His name’s Vincent Carlucci.”
“Carlucci?” Roger chuckles. “I’ll bet he can get me a ticket. He’ll just make somebody an offer they can’t refuse.”
This time I count to twenty. Roger’s sarcasm is usually harmless, but this time he’s aimed it at my best friend. “I’ve got work to do, Roger,” I say coldly.
I start to turn away, but he calls after me. “Has the money come from your mom’s insurance policy yet?”
“Roger!”
“Excuse me for taking an interest!”
Out of the corner of my eye I watch him head up the aisle toward the lobby. “Jesus,” I curse under my breath, answering the telephone on its first ring. “Hello.”
“Hi there.”
The female voice is familiar, but I can’t place it, and as the seconds tick by and I hesitate to respond, I can feel my blood pressure rising. I hate making people feel like they aren’t important.
“Augustus?”
Relief. It’s Mary. This is the first time we’ve ever spoken on the phone and her voice sounds different over a wire. “Hi, Mary.” She hasn’t been in today. I was wondering where she was.
“Did you miss me?” she asks in a sweet voice.
“Of course.”
“What’s the Nasdaq doing?”
“You mean you don’t have all of that information at a push of a button on your cell phone?” I tease.
“I haven’t gone that far yet, but maybe I should.”
There’s a horn in the background so I can tell she’s on the road. “Tooling around in your Jag, huh?”
“Yup, making all the guys jealous.” She laughs. “So what’s the market doing?”
I glance at the thin ticker scrolling continuously across the top of my computer screen. “Up just fifteen and change. It’s been a slow day. Everybody must be at the beach.”
“Must be. Hey, I’ve got a favor to ask you. Let’s have dinner tomorrow night. A man Jacob introduced me to a few months before he died just opened a new restaurant in Adams Morgan. He wants me to see the place, and I can’t very well say no because he was a good friend of Jacob’s. But I think he wants to date me, so I don’t want to go alone because I’m not interested in him that way.” She hesitates. “Will you come?”
I’ve noticed that when Mary talks about something that happened in her recent past, she almost always describes it in relation to the day Jacob died. She bought a kitten three months after Jacob died. She and Jacob went to Paris three months before he died. She’s been seeing her psychic, Sasha, since Jacob died.
“Let’s talk about it tomorrow morning,” I suggest.
I don’t want to be anybody’s chaperone, and I’ll probably want to go to bed early tomorrow night. Vincent called this morning to warn me that he’d rented a limousine for tonight, and that we’d be staying out late. He also said he was going to have a surprise for me at the end of the night. Something to celebrate my new career. I tried to pry out of him what he was talking about, but he wouldn’t say. I told him about the quick profit on the put options—the hundred grand. He was pretty impressed and he said he thought that would cinch the deal with his investors. I hope he’s right. I could make two hundred thousand a year managing ten million bucks for them.
“I’ll be disappointed if you don’t come,” Mary says.
“We’ll see tomorrow.”
“Okay. Listen, I’m about to go into a bad reception area, and I know there’s nothing more annoying than talking to people
when their cell phones are fading in and out, so I’ll save you the aggravation. See you in the morning.”
“Bye,” I say, but she’s already gone.
“So how’s our lovely Sassy? She can’t go a day without talking to you, can she?” Slammer is staring down at me from his cubicle, sucking on a lollipop. “She hasn’t called me today.”
“Don’t bother me right now, pal,” I warn him. “I’m very busy.”
“That woman certainly is sweet on you,” he says. “She used to talk to me a lot, but not anymore. Now she only talks to you, Gus.”
I look him squarely in the eye. “I warned you about calling me that.”
Slammer chuckles and disappears. A moment later he’s back at the partition, holding up his briefcase. “I’m going home a little early today. Got some errands I need to run,” he announces, pointing at the briefcase. “See you tomorrow, Gus.”
I roll my eyes. From now on I’m just going to ignore the idiot.
Forty minutes later Anna’s voice crackles through the intercom speaker. “Vincent Carlucci is in the lobby for you.”
“Okay, thanks. Be right there.”
I notice that the message light on my telephone is blinking. I forwarded my calls to voice mail after Slammer left so I wouldn’t be disturbed. Most likely it was Vincent trying to call me on his way over here. Glancing at my watch, I decide I’ll listen to the message tomorrow.
I expect Vincent to be draped all over Anna’s reception desk like he was last time I came out here to meet him, but he isn’t. He’s sitting on the couch, quietly leafing through a business magazine I know he’s got no interest in, and Anna is staring down at a blank pad of paper. In the few seconds it took me to get out here he must have already insulted her. He can be pretty crude after a couple of drinks, and it wouldn’t surprise me if he threw back a gin and tonic or two on the way over.