Freaks I've Met by Donald Jans

Author:Donald Jans [Jans, Donald]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780996175616
Publisher: Donald Jans
Published: 2015-03-17T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 29

The Secret

Nadar was different than the rest of the freaks. He wasn’t disabled or a minority. He just did business. He shot up the leader board within weeks. By watching and listening to him, he finally revealed to me the big secret of the producers.

Service, schmervice. We were here to make as much money as possible without the customer finding out how much they were overpaying. That part wasn’t the secret. The secret was how you did it.

It went like this. If someone gave you a hard time about a price, or put you in too much competition, you narrowed your profit margin to next to nothing to win that trade. That way if they didn’t give you the business you’d know you were wasting your time; they were just using you to price their real brokers. But if you did win, you’d do that a couple more times until finally you were their pet dove. Then you could viciously punish them with a huge mark when you knew they were too busy and not checking other dealers’ offers since they thought you were the low-price leader.

Kind of like grocery store ads for cheap hamburger that get you in the door so they can really stick it to you with overpriced light bulbs and raspberries. You were in the store already and just wanted to get the hell out of there.

“It’s just good clean business, Jack. Hard work mixed with talent,” Thor used to say when I first asked him for his tricks of the trade. Now I knew why they said nothing. It was so simple, so dirty. Anybody could do it.

Getting the guts up to try it was nerve-wracking. I needed every penny to avoid the clutches of Hazel or a permanent trip back to Spokane. But the next week I held my breath and worked for free, and my trades doubled. Now they were starting to owe me. It was time for some serious pants pulling.

“Atta boy, Jack. I told you, ya need a little larceny in your heart to be good at this.” Phil rubbed my shoulders as I filled out an $8,000 commission ticket. I looked up to Wyatt and winked. That was probably a mistake, but even he couldn’t stop me. The next week I made $25,000. Then only $3,000, but the following week netted me $30,000.

“I think you’re ready for the big time,” Phil said as I looked up at him like a puppy from my chair.

“What could be better than this?” I asked.

“A little I-O-P-O action,” he whispered.

It was as filthy and scary as the word heroin. They were derivatives, a word only to be mentioned under your breath. Not even the traders at Merrill knew what they were really worth.

“You serious? I don’t know. Those things are kind of tricky, aren’t they?”

Phil leaned in closer. “All you need to know is, if your customer thinks rates are going up, you sell them an I-O. And if they think they are going down?”

“A P-O.

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