Trading Day 2

The Great SPACksby

Sometimes, when I feel truly inspired, I look down from my pedestal of privilege and attempt to inscribe what I see. I slowly sipped my coffee – black, no sugar – and allowed my soul music to consume my thoughts, imagining myself as a widely respected and well to-do thinker in a way that only I could currently see myself as. As I vapidly watched the steam rise from my drink, I recalled one of my favorite sayings – “Good coffee doesn’t need sugar; other coffee doesn’t deserve it” – and lazily tried to remember who the original possessor of those words was.

With a full tummy and a vibrant caffeine buzz, I reflected on how my life had turned into charts and suits, where money was only a red or green number at the end of the day. Green allowed me to actually read the description of the meal presented to me at night – red simply lead to sleepless nights. Ordinary objects ceased to have a real value. The only dollar signs I noticed preceded letters and the mesmerizing, constantly changing numbers following them. No matter where I sat, where I drove, where I flew – I could only think of the numbers; where they were going, what they meant. I slowly packed up my things and called a taxi to the airport, where I was off to discuss more numbers with more suits.

It had been years since that first flight, but the banality the word “airport” brought on had never left. I trudged through the security lines yet again, predicting every word of the 3 ounces, shoes off, pockets empty speech that the guard in front of me was paid to repeat. I shuffled through the ever-controversial full body scanner, apathetic to what the lady screening would actually be able to see. It had been many years since I had started the endless ritual of what is called a “business traveler”. There were many detractors at first. My parents stated that traveling this much for the pay I set for myself was a “travesty”, and that I could always file a Form 4.  My girlfriend at the time gave me the ultimatum of our relationship, or the fund. I guess we both learned how much I valued our relationship mark-to-market. My only friend asked me what had driven me to start a fund where I’d be flying three to four days a week looking for reverse merger targets. My only response was, what hadn’t? He stopped responding to my emails shortly after.

I made it to my gate 45 minutes early, 15 minutes later than the benchmark I always kept. I surveyed the people sitting around me, presumably fellow passengers. Apart from the regular image of average people doing average things, I noticed two small children plunk down right beside me. One of the kids, a boy who looked no older than 5, looked at me with the facial expression of someone who had never not seen a smile. His face turned quizzical as we stared at each other, me with my five-day-old “alcoholic” stubble, as I liked to call it when I hadn’t shaved in a little while, and him with his bright brown eyes yet to discover the world he was about to encounter. As he seemed ready to speak, his father came over and grabbed him, leaving me to contemplate what it was he was about to ask me: Where are you from? What do you do? …questions that I thought had no meaning.

I was just getting situated in my standard window seat at the back of first class when the young boy sat down next to me. I raised my eyes in surprise – was I really that interesting of a person to him that he ditched following his parents to sit next to me? As I was about to ask him where his dad was, a voice asked from the seat in front of me if it would be “alright” if his son sat next to me. After assuring the boy’s dad that there was no issue, I ordered a jack on the rocks from the waitress and began the ritual that had gotten me through so many flights before.

I don’t believe I had any strong feelings towards flying, good or bad. The attractive aspect of being 30000 feet in the air, to me, was the complete feeling of isolation that came with it. There was no image to perpetuate, no pleasantries to be exchanged, and no conversation needing to be had for the sake of “productivity”. As I sipped my drink and stared out the window at the deep nothingness the skies held, I wondered if there was something telling about my ideal place of residence being one so empty. My thoughts on the conjoined emptiness of the skies and my life were interrupted by the captain stating that our flight would be filled with “heavy turbulence”, so the flight attendants would not leave their seats for the duration of the flight. This was followed by the boy next to me asking if we would have a crash landing. As his bemused father said no, and as I realized this drink was probably the last one I’d be getting on my flight, I considered the possibility the boy had suggested, and wondered what would happen. Perhaps it is a dark thought to consider the prospect of crashing while flying in an airplane, but it comes packaged with the bleakness and blackness of the night sky the plane penetrates. Like the plane, I too was penetrating the bleakness of the mind. Would I have a crash landing? What would happen? I pictured the headlines: “Commuter Jet struck by Lightning, 30 dead” Would anyone know that I was on the flight that fell, or just assume I had dropped my communications with them off the grid? If, by some Sully-esque miracle, we survived, what was the spread between the valuation of the lives of the women and children versus my own? Would they converge, or would I be left to drown?

I had always lived a fairly comfortable life – “privileged”, as some might call it. Lately there had been a lot of discussion about the topic; I wasn’t sure what for. I interpreted it as a movement to raise awareness of the topic; however, I was perfectly aware of what I had and what I did with it. I didn’t believe I needed to apologize or make reparations for being born and working in comfortable circumstances – I probably did much better with my circumstances than most other people would have done. I certainly did better than my peers, and for the world, if increasing shareholder value was the “going green” that the ESG initiative was meant to incentivize.

As far as I could tell, the less wealthy – the “underprivileged” – truly believed that money equated to happiness. I heard the rhetoric from the populist politicians of the present election cycle; that the financial world’s “unchecked greed and perpetual fraud” had left the country in a state of economic, and therefore happiness, imbalance. From my perspective, the only perpetual fraud I partook in was giving off the image of actually enjoying my wealth, be it the cars, the clothes, or the drinks. I saw how the importance of “things” drained away and numbed the effects of cost, opportunity or financial. I saw how “helping others” was now determined by ink on a check, and not the words or actions I took, in my eyes, for the better. I saw a public seemingly privy to how “privileged” people lived, yet never looking past only what they cared to see.  And no matter how vehemently I argued or explained otherwise, in a sickly comical manner, “privilege” was thrown at me in the fashion of rent control preventing true price discovery.

As I landed and exited the cab that took me to the Ritz-Carlton, I revisited yesterday’s closing portfolio value just before the weekend. It had been a tremendously red day, where yet another country had set the value of its currency to an artificially high peg, so, consequently, yields rose and equities tanked. Theoretically, stock price movement can be thought of in terms of Brownian motion. This assumes that price movement, be it up or down, is random. However, in practice, there are fundamental reasons for movement as well as mathematical, though, of course, liquidity is the all-encompassing manner of looking at price (which itself is just the meeting of the bid and the ask). In this particular day, however, there was no movement down – it only gapped down. 30% of my shareholders’ nebulous value had simply evaporated, in what was almost certainly only the beginning. Perhaps the portfolio, and conjunctively myself, were in transit to the bottom. I looked out the window of my 12th floor room, across the bay, and saw a green light fading in the distance. Resignedly, I understood that it was time for another gap down. I only hoped that I would be granted the privilege of not seeing the red at the bottom.