Total pages in book: 64
Estimated words: 63862 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 63862 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 319(@200wpm)___ 255(@250wpm)___ 213(@300wpm)
That wasn’t going to help the situation.
Neither, I decided after stuffing my face, was having him cook for me all the time going to help. Because his cooking was better than most things I’d ever eaten. Which was saying something with how much I’d traveled and sampled food around the world.
“Do you bake too?” I asked, even though I couldn’t fit another bite in if I tried.
“I don’t.”
“Why not?”
“Cooking is an… art. Baking is a science. I prefer being able to improvise and adjust things.”
“Well, you also live in a city with a ton of amazing bakeries, so why bother?”
“You never wanted to learn?”
“Baking? No. I mean, I decorated cookies and stuff when I was younger. And I show up and drink wine while the moms or cousins bake for the holidays. But it never called to me.”
“What did? Aside from cards. And ice skating. Poetry…”
I winced.
“I never really picked up on homey hobbies like cooking or baking. Or gardening. I do like reading. But other than that, I think most of the things I like involve travel. New places, new food, new experiences. I’ve always been… restless.”
“Have you ever considered that you are restless because you don’t have a home base to get comfortable in?”
“Maybe,” I agreed. My own family had been making that argument for years. “But my job also requires… movement.”
“Is it just cards?”
“What do you mean?”
“Are you drawn to other high-stakes risk-taking, or is it only the game?”
“Like, what? Skydiving?”
“I was thinking more… stocks and investing.”
“Oh. Well, I mean… I’m invested. But I don’t actually handle that. I have a guy, and he does mostly low-risk investments for me. Building up a retirement kind of thing.”
“Would you be open to an experiment?” he asked, taking the plates and heading toward the kitchen.
“What kind of experiment?”
“I give you a hundred—”
“I don’t need your money.”
To that, he shot me a raised-brow look. “How about you hear me out before you decide?”
“Fine.”
“If I give you a hundred thousand to play with.”
“Play with?”
“In the market.”
“I don’t know anything about the market.”
“You can learn. It’s all just odds and research. With a healthy dose of good instincts. The same kind of thing you picked up on that made you good at poker.”
“You understand that you could be losing a hundred-thousand dollars.”
“Life is risk.”
“Said like someone who never had to worry about money.”
“Let’s not pretend that we are from such different worlds. True, we had very different upbringings, but you grew up with money too.”
He wasn’t wrong.
It wasn’t old, generational wealth. But we’d never struggled. The money was always there.
“I’m not looking at this like you’re throwing away money. I’m looking at it the way my family looked at handing me the business once they were gone. A gamble. Trust. A chance to prove oneself.”
“Why?”
“To humor me.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Aside from whatever money you make?” he asked as he started to empty the dishwasher.
“Yeah.”
He paused, a mug in his hands, considering.
“If you can grow the initial investment by fifteen to twenty percent in under sixty days, I’ll sign your papers.”
I didn’t know a lot about trading. But fifteen to twenty percent seemed aggressive as hell.
But my poker brain leaned forward, already stacking chips. Because fifteen percent wasn’t impossible. And I was really good at beating odds.
“You’re on.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN
It was like studying for a final exam.
The entire surface of the coffee table was covered with various investing books I’d picked up at the local bookstore. My laptop, tablet, and phone were each open to different research pages, looking into various stocks I was considering investing in, and the TV was on the news channel with the little stock crawl across the bottom.
I was, if you’ll forgive the pun, invested.
I’d always loved a challenge.
And, damn him, Harrison was right; investing was a lot like gambling: the risk, the reward, the careful planning mixed with gut instinct.
Everything I’d learned over the past two days had me itching to dive in.
If I wanted to win, I needed to dive in. I was just giving myself until the end of the day to research.
Then, well, it was time to trust everything I’d learned, invest, and watch things like a hawk.
It seemed like my best bet was to invest sixty to seventy percent in something stable like the S&P 500. Then I would take twenty to thirty percent for strategic growth: undervalued companies, momentum stocks, short-term catalysts.
I would keep five to ten percent as a pressure valve. This was all gut instincts and short-term, high-risk trades. I was calling it my “Idiot Fund.”
It was where I would win or lose the most dramatically.
Naturally, it was what I was also most excited about.
I’d been so fixated on learning that I’d almost completely forgotten to keep messing with Harrison.
I did spend almost the whole night before screwing with the thermostat. Each time he got up to turn it down, I cranked it up higher. I was in my room with the vent closed, in my underwear, with the window open because it was so damn hot. But it was fun to hear him grumble as he made his way back into the common area each time to turn it back down.