This is a little OT, but as you will see, it’s even more on-topic
It’s about a novel that I just finished reading called The Trade Off by Samantha Greene Woodruff. It made a huge impression on me and I think that if I had read it before 2021 it’s very possible that I might have avoided the long disastrous sell-off in our stocks from Nov 2021 to the end of 2022. It takes place in the several years leading up to the huge crash in Oct of 1929 (almost a century ago), but I couldn’t have actually read it before 2021 because it was just published this year, in 2024.
The book gripped me. I could hardly put it down to go to other activities like eating and sleeping. It was partly, I guess, because I knew what was coming (the 1929 Crash), which added to the suspense instead of detracting from it, because you know it’s hanging over the people in the story but they don’t know it yet.
I’ll tell you a little about it without giving away the whole plot. The protagonist, Bea, is the daughter of an imigrant family which had fled the pogroms in Russia. Her father now sell’s vegetables from a push cart. Her mother had come from a wealthy family and can’t accept her loss of status in the slums of the Lower East Side of NYC.
Bea has graduated top in her class at Hunter Collge. She is very bright, and very sharp, and very interested in the stock market and wants to become a stock broker, but is blocked from that because she is a woman, and an imigrant, and and she doesn’t have a lot of wealthy connections, and because Hunter College is a free City College, so it gave her no prestige with the broker snobs. (My own mother graduated from Hunter College a few years later in the early 30’s).
Bea tried for a job at JP Morgan’s Bank (among others) as a broker but ends up working in the Wire Room (where the tickertape is) because she had been told that “a woman can’t be a broker” every place she had looked. She becomes an unofficial whiz at following the stocks and analyzing patterns (although no one asks her about what she’s figuring out (the woman thing again). And the plot goes from there with loads of stock moves and positions, plenty of eccentric and interesting characters and lots of love interests. I loved it, and would recommend it to anyone interested in stocks and the stock market.
