The Vale of Laughter: A Novel by De Vries Peter

Author:De Vries, Peter [De Vries, Peter]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497669703
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2014-10-20T22:00:00+00:00

nine

I HAD by now learned something disturbing about MacNaughton’s plans for his money. The approach of a grandchild made him feel he owed me a complete and candid clarification on this point, so that I knew exactly where I stood and should not be deluding myself with false hopes and expectations about my own future.

He was going to leave everything to Mrs. MacNaughton, after whom it would be settled in trust on their coming grandchild or grandchildren (it was to be hoped there would be more). The handwriting on the wall was clear for me. I would be bypassed. It would be imprudent to let me get my hands on moneys of any quantity, was the implication. My investment history left no doubt on that score. Financial theory was my field, not its practice.

Stung to action by this blow, I had in the last months of Naughty’s pregnancy embarked on what was at once the boldest and most sophisticated of my market ploys.

I had something slightly under seven thousand dollars in stocks, bonds and surplus cash. In other words, nothing. Adjusted for proportionate growth to age sixty-five, still nothing. Therefore nothing could be lost by shooting craps with it. Not that what I did was exactly that. I sold something short, a perfectly commonplace trading maneuver, though I had never attempted it before. It is only for the nimblest traders. A short position simply reverses the normal order of buying and selling. You sell a stock at a price from which you are confident it will decline, and buy it later at the lower quotation, borrowing it meanwhile to make good your delivery, and banking the profits. I had had my eye on an aerospace issue known as Planetronics, a Buck Rogers stock grossly overpriced after a sensational run-up based on government contracts for a solid fuel component. It was selling at forty times earnings, with no dividends, and I had it on inside authority, from Farber, that an unfavorable earnings report was in the offing. It seemed bound to plummet from its current historic high of 22. I sold seven hundred shares of it at that price and sat back to wait for it to sink. I had ninety days in which to buy. Most astute observers were bearish about the market in general then, including myself.

I now had a couch in my office, an old one I had snatched from disposal as two workmen were dragging it out to the alley. It had a few gashes and was severely herniated inside, but still comfortable for all of that. The increasing overtime I put in on the Market Letter justified it. I was taking a leaf from MacNaughton’s book. Naps such as revitalized my father-in-law, however, remained elusive in my case. I supposed I would never become a tycoon so long as I was troubled with insomnia at the office. I lay stretched out on the couch one afternoon trying to count sheep when Fido Harrison walked in.

“Let Rome in Tiber melt?” he said, with his taut little smile.

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