gave me an order to buy 3,000 Deutsche Bank, another half a million pounds or so. More than adequate recompense for a profitable misunderstanding.
My skiing holiday was virtually arranged, which was just as well with only a few days to go. I always left it to the very last moment in the belief that people would fall over themselves with gratitude at being invited, with the result that by the time it got mentioned to anyone of my choice they had already booked up elsewhere, so I ended up having to invite people like Alick and the wife’s friend Chip.
Dramatis Personae, skiing holiday. (Provisional.)
1 Me.
2 Rika (possibly/probably, the latter two-to-one on, favourite).
3 Chip, American friend of above.
4 Niall, lunatic Scotsman.
5 Alick, boss. He would join us in the middle of the first week some time.
6 Verona, twenty-seven, the youngest ever director of Breese, Spotch and Betts, advertising agency.
We were still short of a car, and it occurred to me that Verona probably had a nice company car. A quick telephone call, veiled threat of withdrawal of invitation, and a Maserati Biturbo convertible had been made available, but on condition of Verona bringing her sister Sienna. So,
1 Sienna, younger sister to the above.
Mr Hoshide’s Swedish stock went up another seven per cent, making a total of twelve in two days. I advised him to take profits, which he did. I liked Mr Hoshide, he did what he was told. There was a chance he would miss a further rise, but from my point of view to sell was a risk-free recommendation. If he didn’t take my advice to take profits, and the stock fell, I would be proved right again. If it went up further he’d pat himself on the back for knowing more about the markets than his broker, so he would be pleased either way.
He told me that he had no plans for the Easter holiday other than to relax, go to the park and do a bit of shopping with his wife. I persuaded him that as he was in Europe for only a short while he should get out and see a bit of it. I even got him to agree to take a couple of extra days off. ‘When in Lome, do as the Lomans.’ Result: an afternoon on the phone to various travel agents trying to arrange an Easter break for him and Mrs Hoshide.
Since the end of the Gulf War, all those cowards who had been too scared to get on an aeroplane for fear of meeting an untimely death at the hands of Saddam’s terrorists had been making up for lost time: as if terrorists would have had any interest at all in nonentities like senior Merrill Lynch management, who were re-emerging from under their stones in New York to take their wives shopping in London and enact some delayed redundancies in London at the same time. They had probably missed the safest travel conditions ever, with all that hysterical extra airport security, and far fewer travellers.
This pent-up demand for travel meant that organising an Easter break for Mr and Mrs Hoshide was next to impossible. Preferred destinations of Venice, Barcelona and Prague being unavailable at the price, I eventually got them on a coach tour of East German industrial installations, topical if nothing else. They would be able to buy themselves a chunk of Berlin Wall, some nice Dresden china to take home, and have themselves photographed next to a Trabbie.
Giussi got some more orders. Her Italian clients were turning out rather well. It all goes to show that it is not what you know, but who you know. What you look like does no harm either.
One excitement at the time was that Alick, Henry and Charlie had been interviewing a Nordic person, who had impressed them a great deal. ‘A bit of a bandit,’ he had been described as. When asked his salary, he had named successively higher figures to each of them, as he felt more confident.
Logistically, I wondered how this was going to work, because there weren’t any spare work stations in our area.
Nordic people are staid and dull on paper, but they can out-spiv any East Ender. Scandinavian institutions, out of naïvety one assumes, are used to paying far larger commissions on international stocks than others. You can often make them pay 0.5 per cent commission on a UK stock, for example, when a UK institution might pay 0.2 per cent or nothing at all.
I had an exciting time picking up Gen from Rory’s. I double-parked, as usual, leaving the keys in the ignition, as usual. When Gen and I turned to walk to where the car had been, only ten yards from the house, it had gone. Nicked, purloined, schnaffeled, rustled, Rikappropriated. I had had my back turned to it for a maximum of a minute. Rory’s Mum saw a man take it as she was talking to me.
‘Oh, I didn’t realise it was yours.’ Her description for the police was particularly useful. ‘Man in a green sweatshirt.’
I dialled 999 for the first time in my life.
‘Police, fire or ambulance?’
‘Police, quick.’ Three minute wait.
Any chance of heading the car off evaporated rapidly.
I had to give various fatuous details like my name and address to some police message-clearing centre. By the time an alert reached Camberwell the car would be in Croydon. Imagine if it were more serious; ‘I, Jim Parton, no, not Jim Parsons, Parton as in the buxom singer, ha, ha, ha, of Twenty-eight Dunroamin’ Villas, yes, ‘n’ apostrophe, am fending off a frenzied axe murderer, could you come and save me?’
Having the same surname as Dolly Parton is quite handy. For some reason, certain types of people find it hilarious to call me Dolly. For my part, I find this tendency a useful and infallible index as to whether or not my interlocutor is a prat.
The car had only been a company car, but its theft was a serious blow to the skiing holiday.
It was Friday, and the last morning meeting before freedom. The disappointing demise of my car didn’t stop me making some brilliant remarks about Hermès ties and the ex-Army officer’s need for conformity. The electronics analyst with the gravy stains found me amusing, and I even raised a faint titter from the exponent of the dismal science.
There was news that Ron the redundant market maker had got another job already, and would be starting with a Japanese securities house on Monday. That made just two weeks unemployed. I thought he was off his head; I could never understand the urgency some people had to pile back into work when they had just received a fat redundancy cheque and could therefore take a nice long holiday.
Giussi asked why it was that the unpronounceable Swedish stock, which had risen another eight per cent since Mr Hoshide’s sale, making a total of twenty, was going up when our analyst had said it was a sell.
‘More buyers than sellers, Giussi,’ came an irony laden chorus from around the table. This is stockbroker speak for ‘We don’t know’.
It would take Giussi about a year to work out that stock analysts’ earnings forecasts are rarely right and that even when they are, it is just as rare for the shares to react in the way expected. There are just too many unpredictable variables such as Berlin Wall falls (shares rise, border guard gets crushed), Saddam invades Kuwait (shares fall, plump Arabs flee), unemployment increases for the tenth month running (shares do nothing at all), general panic occurs for no identifiable reason (shares crash, or, just as likely, soar).
Many stockbrokers are vain enough to believe that they might be capable of supplying correct recommendations. Equally, many fund managers think they can act correctly on the recommendations, or cleverly disagree with them. A dartboard is a more valuable tool than a fund manager’s judgement, because at least then you save his monstrous fees.
The discreet use of insider knowledge is the only sure way of beating the dartboard. Contrary to popular opinion, this is surprisingly rare. I don’t think I was ever in possession of this kind of information, in a form in which I could act on it and make myself a fortune. I once acted on a tip that a company was going to be taken over, but it turned out to be wrong.
There are occasional successes by analysts. Derek Terrington at UBS Phillips and Drew was not allowed to express his fears about Maxwell because the corporate finance department were touting for business. Instead