“So. Marc Daubenay tells me you’ve come into rather a large sum of money.”
He looked at me, waiting for me to say something in response. I didn’t know what to say, so I just kind of pursed my lips. After a while Younger continued:
“Over the last century the stock market has outperformed cash in every decade apart from the thirties. Far outperformed. As a rule of thumb, you can expect your capital to double over five years. In the current market conditions, you can reduce that figure to three, perhaps even two.”
“How does it work?” I asked him. “I invest in companies and they let me share in their profits?”
“No,” he said. “Well, yes, that’s a small aspect of it. They give you a dividend. But what really propels your investment upwards is speculation.”
“Speculation?” I repeated. “What’s that?”
“Shares are constantly being bought and sold,” he said. “The prices aren’t fixed: they change depending on what people are prepared to pay for them. When people buy shares, they don’t value them by what they actually represent in terms of goods or services: they value them by what they might be worth, in an imaginary future.”
“But what if that future comes and they’re not worth what people thought they would be?” I asked.
“It never does,” said Matthew Younger. “By the time one future’s there, there’s another one being imagined. The collective imagination of all the investors keeps projecting futures, keeping the shares buoyant. Of course, sometimes a particular set of shares stop catching people’s imagination, so they fall. It’s our job to get you out of a particular one before it falls-and, conversely, to get you into another when it’s just about to shoot up.”
“What if everyone stops imagining futures for all of them at the same time?” I asked him.
“Ah!” Younger’s eyebrows dipped into a frown, and his voice became quieter, withdrawing from the room back to his small mouth and chest. “That throws the switch on the whole system, and the market crashes. That’s what happened in ’29. In theory it could happen again.” He looked sombre for a moment; then his hearty look came back-and, with it, his booming voice as he resumed: “But if no one thinks it will, it won’t.”
“And do they think it will?”
“No.”
“Cool,” I said. “Let’s buy some shares.”
Matthew Younger pulled a large catalogue from his dossier and flipped it open. It was full of charts and tables, like some kind of tidal almanac.
“With the kind of capital you’ve got earmarked for investment,” he said, “I think we can envisage cultivating quite a large portfolio.”
“What’s a portfolio?” I asked him.
“Oh, that’s what we call the spread of your investments,” he explained. “It’s a bit like playing a roulette table-with the important distinction that you win here, whereas in roulette you mostly lose. But with a roulette table, there are sectors, clusters of numbers you can bet on, then rows, then colours, odds/evens and so on. The wise roulette player covers the whole board strategically rather than staking all his chips on just one number. Similarly, when playing the stock market you should cover several fields. There’s banking, manufacturing, telecommunications, oil, pharmaceuticals, technology…”
“Technology,” I said. “I like technology.”
“Good,” Younger said. “That sector’s one we’re very well-disposed towards as well. We could…”
“What was the one you mentioned just before that?” I asked.
“Pharmaceuticals. The big drug companies are always an…”
“No: before that.”
“Oil?”
“No: signals, messages, connections.”
“Telecommunications?”
“Yes! Exactly.”
“That’s a very promising sector. Mobile telephone penetration is increasing at an almost exponential rate year after year. And then as more types of link-up between phones and internet and hi-fi systems and who knows what else become possible, more imaginary futures open up. You see the principle?”
“Yes,” I said. “Let’s go for those two: telecommunications and technology.”
“Well, we could certainly weight your portfolio in that direction,” Younger began-but paused when the perfectly-held-hair receptionist walked in. “Ah, here’s your coffee,” he said.
She was carrying it on a small tray, like the ones stewardesses use in aeroplanes. As she set it down on the polished table I noticed that it was a two-part construction: the cup itself, then, slotted into that, a plastic filter section where the coffee grains themselves were. It made me think of those moon landing modules from the Sixties, the way the segments slot together. There was a saucer too, of course: three parts. The receptionist lowered the whole assemblage gently down onto the table’s surface, set a small jar of cream, a bowl of rough-hewn blocks of sugar and a spoon beside it, and then blasted away again with the tray.
“We could certainly look at weighting it that way,” Younger continued. “But my point in putting forward the roulette analogy was that it’s best to cover several sectors of the…”
“Yes, I understand,” I told him. “But I want to know where I am. To occupy a particular sector, rather than be everywhere and nowhere, all confused. I want to have a…a…” I searched for the right word for a long time, and eventually found it: “position.”
“A position?” he repeated.
“Yes,” I said. “A position. Telecommunications and technology.”
Now Younger looked flustered.
“While I view both these sectors as most promising ones, I feel that this degree of localization, and especially given the great sum we’re proposing to invest, does represent an excessive level of exposure to contingencies. I’d much prefer…”
“If you won’t do it,” I said, “I’ll go to another stockbroker.”
Younger tensed up. He seemed to shrink even more; his voice shrank into silence while he took in what I’d said. Then he struck up that hearty look once more, took a deep breath and boomed out:
“We can do it. Absolutely. It’s your money. I merely advise. I’d advise a degree of diversification-but if you don’t want that, then that’s perfectly…”
“Telecommunications and technology,” I said. As soon as he’d explained how it worked, I’d known exactly what I wanted, instantly. It was my money, not his.
Matthew Younger started flicking through the pages of his almanac. I lifted the filter section off my coffee cup and tried to balance it on the saucer’s edge, but it fell off onto the table. I noticed that the water hadn’t filtered through completely: black goop was still seeping from the gauze bottom, running out across the table’s surface. I dabbed at it with my fingers, trying to stop it reaching the table’s edge and dribbling onto my trousers. But diverting it just made the stream run faster, and I ended up getting it on my trousers and my fingers too. It was sticky and black, like tar.
“I do apologize,” Matthew Younger said. He reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a clean silk handkerchief. I rubbed my fingers with it until the wet stuff had gone dry and gritty; then I handed it back to him and he started talking me through the telecommunications and technology sections of his almanac.
Within half an hour we’d chosen a company that made small chips for computers, two of the major mobile telephone network providers and one handset manufacturer, one terrestrial telephone and cable television company, an aerospace researcher and manufacturer, an outfit that did encryption for the internet, another that made software whose function I didn’t really understand, a producer of flat audio speakers, some other software people and another micro thing. I can’t remember them alclass="underline" there were plenty of them. There was a games company, an interactive TV pioneer, a business who make those handheld gadgets that let you know exactly where you are at any given time by bouncing signals into space and back again-more, lots more. By the time I’d left we’d sunk more than eighty per cent of my money into shares. A million we kept in cash and placed in a building society account that Younger helped me fill in the forms for right there. We kept one hundred and fifty thousand in the holding tank account that Marc Daubenay had opened for me that morning.