Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money (10 page)

“Like I said: Ouch. What were you
thinking?”

Fortunately, I was spared answering by a
spate of activity on Sal’s end: activity that didn’t involve me or
LRG. I stayed on the line, listening to the familiar hubbub without
even the faintest twinge of longing or nostalgia. Funny.

Sal was off the line a long time — maybe 10
minutes — but when he came back, he had some news. “I asked a guy,
who asked a guy. You know?”

I did.

“He says the dude is missing. The Billings
dude. And not missing friendly.”

“No way.”

“Way.”

“What do you think that means: missing?”

“Dunno. That’s all I’ve got.”

I knew better than to ask how he knew or
from whom he’d heard. In fact, Sal had only told me this much
because he knew I
wouldn’t
ask. I wanted to, but I saved
it.

“Well thanks, Sal. I guess that explains the
halt.”

“Yeah, but there’s more on your scummy
security. You looked at the intradays? Looks to me like LRG had
some serious short action this morning.”

I suddenly felt, if possible, even stupider
than I had before. And with my stomach plummeting to the region of
my knees, I felt sicker, as well.

“You can’t
know
it was short action,
Sal,” I said while I brought the charts up on my own screen. “Not
from the intradays.”

“Of course not, Carter. I can’t
know
.
But look at them. Study them. And tell me what you see.”

And, of course, he was right. It wasn’t, at
this point, verifiable. But the large blocks of stock that had
traded together, and the prices they’d traded at, indicated pretty
clearly that’s what it was. To anyone who was looking carefully
enough and who knew what they were looking at.

How had I missed this? Or rather, why hadn’t
I checked? After Sal and I had said a quick good-bye — he was
working and I felt the need to indulge in some serious
self-flagellation along with the self-pity and self-loathing anyway
— I looked carefully at the intraday chart. As I had suspected: the
possible short action Sal was talking about had come at ten am
Eastern time. So, in Madeline time, I’d probably been someplace
between a shampoo and a condition when the first big whack of
stocks hit the market and started a gentle plummet. By the time I
was slicing my Haas, the plummet had gone as far as it could go
because the trading halt had been called. And, who knows? If there
had been no halt, LRG might have ridden the hump and continued the
upward trend I’d spotted this morning. But, seeing what I was
seeing, I doubted it. A lot.

The invisible hands tightened their grasp on
my throat.
And
I felt like an idiot.

Shortselling is an odd phenomenon, something
exclusively the domain of the stock market. I’ve tried to come up
with real world parallels and I can’t. It’s completely
counterintuitive: it goes against everything you’ve ever been
taught about how monetary interaction works... outside of the stock
market.

A shortsell is when someone sells stocks
they don’t own in anticipation of the stock price going down. When
that happens, the seller can then cover their position by buying
the stock they’ve already sold at a much lower price than they
bought at, pocketing the difference. There’s the potential to make
a lot of money in between. Sell at two dollars. Stocks you don’t
own. Buy later at one dollar to replace the stocks you already
sold. You keep the buck in the middle. The hitch is, in order for
this to work — in order for you to make money — the stock
has
to go down. It simply must.

In a shortsell the risk is huge. There’s
only a certain amount a stock can drop: if you’ve bought in the
traditional way, once you get to zero, you’ve lost it all and you
can just write it off. But there’s really no top on how high a
stock can go: in a shortsell that backfires you can lose an
infinite amount of money, because the stock could just keep rising
forever.

There had been times in the past when I’d
been
so
confident a stock was going to tank that I’d
seriously considered shortselling it. But, in the end, I couldn’t
make myself do it. There’s nothing actually wrong with
shortselling: from a legal perspective or otherwise. I just can’t
get my head around the part where you have to wish for a stock to
go
down
instead of
up.
Like I said, it’s
counterintuitive and intuition plays a larger part in my schtick
than I tend to admit in public.

But now, obviously, someone without my
particular hang-ups was playing it large with LRG. From my
perspective, the timing pretty much sucked. And then there was the
whole “missing” thing. What the hell did that mean, exactly? Sal
had said Ernie was “not missing friendly,” which could be taken in
a number of ways, but that
had
to mean Ernie was not missing
by choice. Which meant... nothing. And was he missing because of
the shortsell? Or was the shortsell due to Ernie being missing? Or
were the two completely not connected?

A sharp knock on the door interrupted my
self-flagellation. “It’s open,” I called, figuring I knew who it
was. I was right and Tycho’s tail wagged, though he didn’t bother
getting up at the approach of his young mistress.

I swiveled around in my chair, but didn’t
get up either. “Hey, Jen.”

“Madeline do you have a few minutes to
talk?” I looked at her more closely: her hair was pulled back in a
messy ponytail and she looked a little agitated, but otherwise all
right.

“Listen kiddo: I’m having a helluva day. Can
it wait until after one pm? My mind just isn’t here right now.”

If Jennifer was disappointed, she covered it
well. “Sure, Madeline. No problem,” she said as she went for the
door. “Later.”

I forgot about Jennifer the moment the door
closed behind her and the reality of my situation came back. And it
just seemed so flat and bleak: feelings I’d told myself I’d never
have again. I didn’t have any Maalox in the house, but my insides
were suddenly crying for it. It was like needing a fix.

Here is what I know after spending
practically all of my adult life trading: the market is like an
ocean. It can seem unpredictable but, within limits, it isn’t
really. At least, that’s how a successful trader feels: just like a
successful mariner. That with all the right tools and all the right
study, she can get herself around the world. If you followed the
curve of the waves rather than fighting them, in the end it would
all come right. Sometimes it’s just hard to see the end. That’s how
I felt. But here’s the trouble with that analogy: ships sometimes
sink, no matter what quality gear the crew has. If captains thought
about it like that, they’d never leave the harbor. And brokers
would all be herbologists.

I scanned my newsfeed. Nothing from LRG. I
nibbled at my sandwich, but even if I had felt like eating, which I
no longer did, the avocado was starting to look distressingly like
some sort of extremely ripe, brownish-green cheese.

When the phone rang again, I jumped. I
figured I maybe had one nerve left.

“Hi sweetheart, just me again.”

“Hey mom.” She calls me almost every few
days, but never twice in the same day. I knew something had to be
up.

“Madeline, I’m going to tell you something,
but you have to promise not to be mad at me.”

Agreement is easiest in these cases. I know
this. And your loved one will always forgive you if you renege.
It’s just not my nature, though. “How can I promise that, mom? I
don’t even know what it is.”

A sigh. A pause. Another sigh. “I love you,
you know that?”

“Mom!”

“OK, the thing is, right after I got off the
phone with you earlier I called Roddy right away.” Something that
was already low in me sank lower. Roddy was my father’s best friend
and best golfing chum. Since Roddy is a financial consultant, after
my father died it just made sense for him to take over my parent’s
— my mom’s — investment portfolio. And Roddy is a good enough guy.
He cared about my dad, in some ways loves my mom and so was
certainly trustworthy. And
I
sure didn’t want to do it. Bad
enough being responsible for other people’s money, but your
mother’s
? No thank you.

“Do I even want to know this, mom?”

She continued as though I hadn’t spoken. “I
told him what you told me about Ernie...”

“Oh mom, you didn’t do it. Tell me you
didn’t.”

“... and I told him to buy a
lot
of
that stock for me.”

“How much is a lot, mom?” My voice was a
monotone. But I was still a little hopeful. A lot could be anything
to my mom. It could be a few thousand bucks. Nothing serious.

“Well, Roddy had sold some tech stocks I was
holding a while back and he hadn’t found anything for me that he
liked well enough to reinvest the money into...”

“How much mom?”

“Eight thousand shares.”

“At how much?” It was already worse than I
thought.

“A little over six dollars.”

I did a quick calculation. “Are you saying
you bought about fifty thousand dollars of LRG? This morning?
After
we talked.”

“Now sweetie, I knew you’d be mad.”

“Mom, I’m not mad. Really. It’s just that I
feel terrible. I mean, mom: I didn’t tell you to buy that stock. I
didn’t say anything like that. I just thought you’d think it was
funny. About Ernie, I mean.”

“I know sweetie. I know you didn’t tell me.
And I know you
never
tell me. I know it’s your rule. That’s
why I didn’t say anything. But you said you were pretty sure you’d
make a nice chunk on this one, that’s what you said. That’s
exactly
what you said.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “And
after I got off the phone with Roddy, I called Clarissa.”

“Oh mom.”

“And she called her stock guy and bought
some, too.”

“Oh
mom
.” It was a virus. It was
spreading. And I had started it.

“And... and now it’s gone down quite a lot
and Roddy says I should sell but I thought... I thought I’d better
call you.”

It was difficult for me to talk, what with
my forehead pressed to my desk while I studied the floor. My neck
was rapidly crikking up and all the blood was rushing into the top
of my head. But, for the moment, the pain was good. I wanted pain.
Because of a casual remark I had made, my mom was currently down
five thousand bucks on the day. My
mom
: the woman who spent
16 hours in difficult labor bringing me into the world, but who is
too sweetly tempered to ever bring that up at a time like this.
And, needless to say, managing a par three golf course with a snack
bar — not a restaurant — outside of Seattle is not the most
lucrative of occupations. Five thousand bucks was serious change to
her. And her friend Clarissa — who, by the way, is also a widow —
how much had she “invested”? I didn’t even want to know. I had
fleeting thoughts about karma: about what happens when you make the
wrong choice. About how you pay. Was I paying now? With my mother’s
— and my mother’s best friend’s — security?

“Mom, I
can’t
tell you what to do.
I’m not your broker,” I thought about this for a moment. “I’m not
even a broker at all anymore. I can’t give you advice.”

“Madeline Carter: I’m your
mother
,
not a client.”

“I know mom. That’s what I mean.”

“So what should I do?”

“Well,” I checked my screen to confirm what
was happening, “right now there’s a trading halt. You can’t do
anything.”

“I can’t?”

“Roddy didn’t tell you that part?”

“Oh, he might have. Yes, maybe he did. But I
didn’t think it meant I couldn’t actually sell if I wanted to. I
didn’t think that could happen.”

I sighed. My forehead was beginning to
sweat. It was now stuck to the desk. I didn’t mind. “It can. It
does,” another sigh. “It did.”

“When will it stop?”

“Stop being stopped? I’m not sure. Maybe
before the end of the trading day.” There was a time when I had a
spiel for situations like that: Don’t worry, everything will be
fine, it’s all — ahem — par for the course. But that was then. And
never for the woman who, when I was five, had been able to tell I
was up to something if I was too quiet, even when I was in another
room. It had made me think she was magic. “And mom, I really can’t
tell you what to do. I just can’t. Ask Roddy. He’s your broker.
It’s his
job.
”

She was very quiet. “But I’m not his
mother.”

“Mom, I’m sorry. I’m sorry about the whole
thing. I should never have mentioned Ernie or anything. I was
excited: I didn’t think. But please don’t ask me what to do, not
about this. And... I’ll make it up to you somehow. I promise.”

It was that promise that did it. Or maybe
just her childlike acceptance of it. Just as she’d accepted my news
about Ernie and his stupid stock with the same trust. My mother
believed
in me. She always had. And I — inadvertently, sure,
and indirectly — had let her down. I loathed how it made me feel.
And the load it added to a day that had been careening downhill
almost since I’d placed the first cup of coffee on my desk.

I needed action. I wiped the sweat off my
forehead and applied myself to my computer. I consulted several of
the databases I’d signed up for, scanning for information on the
Langton Regional Group. I was looking for, I don’t know, a hint, I
guess. Some kind of clue about whatever was suddenly going on with
LRG: whatever nasty thing I’d inadvertently stumbled into. It was
all information I’d gone over quickly and expertly on Friday and
over the weekend: financials, run downs on LRG’s corporate
structure and press releases and news items going back the last
couple of years. I’d looked through all this stuff before, but even
reading through it again now, with my newly jaundiced eye, it
presented the picture I’d come to prior to this morning’s disaster:
a quiet little company ripe for good things. Except, that wasn’t
what was happening. Not today.