| What made you write A Killing on Wall Street? |
| The idea of an investment/mystery combo originally came from my editor. Somehow word had gotten out that I had written both stock market columns and mysteries for AOL in the mid-nineties, even though the mysteries were written under a pseudonym ["Inspector Forsooth"]. At first I wasn't sure how I was going to pull it off. I delayed making an official proposal, mostly out of fear that the output would be incredibly hokey. But I also found that the challenge of blending investment concepts into a readable mystery was one I couldn't turn down. I sent off a five-page e-mail describing how I would make the combination work, and nine months later we had a book. |
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Your protagonist in A Killing, Cliff Cavanaugh, left a job on Wall Street to become a private eye. Is there some Derrick Niederman in Cliff Cavanaugh? |
| Probably, although Cliff can't write worth a lick and my sleuthing capacity is conjectural at best. I started out as a fixed-income analyst about 20 years ago. I soon moved to equities, and by the time I joined Fidelity in 1987, I was an investment columnist, not an analyst. So I've gotten progressively more qualitative as time has gone by. Cliff, by contrast, is a few years younger than I am and worked as a portfolio manager for individuals. He discovered that his job required more handholding and less investment bravado than he was envisioning, so he set out to manage money on his own. For the record, I'd never even consider the day-trading lifestyle that Cliff blunders into. |
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You are a mathematician turned securities analyst, a writer of investment and mystery books, a cryptic puzzle creator, and a bridge master. Did you find creative, like-minded individuals dwelling behind Wall Street's ruthless, less-than-artistic reputation? |
| Not really, although I've met many people on Wall Street who are world-class bridge players. But the creativity joke was often on me because you really don't always have to be creative to make money in the stock market, and there is such a thing as outsmarting yourself. I found that it's often best to keep your company and market analyses straightforward and find a different outlet for your creative impulses. It's a simple lesson, really — but it took me 10 years to figure out! |
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In A Killing you refer to Cliff Cavanaugh as a buy-and-hold investor on a day trader's timetable — "a hybrid with the functionality of a centaur." How did you deal with Cliff's functionality problem? |
| Cliff is forced into sleuthing as a means of taking his attention away from his computer screen. Otherwise he would have gotten wrapped up in a destructive day-trading time warp — if you're staring at your machine and the stock you're obsessing over doesn't respond within two days (hours?), you can find yourself walking a seriously precarious tightrope above the whole gambit of dangerous emotions: fear, desperation, rage, isolation, to name a few. In today's investment world we have enough online financial information to keep us busy 16 hours a day or even more. But the real winners are those who haven't forgotten that the best investments take time. |
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Your book is also a hybrid — investment primer as well as engaging mystery. In a literary hybrid like A Killing on Wall Street you have to maintain the story and the tension while providing some useful information. It seems like a tremendously difficult thing to manage. How did you handle the problem of two genres, one book? |
| Very carefully. What I did was to make the investment information absolutely central to the solution of the mystery, both in terms of eliminating suspects and, eventually, identifying the guilty party. So this isn't just a mystery set in New York, this is an investor's mystery all the way. You see Cliff analyzing the decedent's investment style and conclude that two specific purchases were out of character. You see him deduce a suspect's age solely by examining her portfolio. |
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How about investment problems? Dot coms and technology companies play a significant role in the book. Especially now that some Internet companies in the 'real world' of post-dot com bubble are off as much as 90 percent from their 52 week highs, do you have any advice on how to invest in them? Do you feel that there is hope for the dot com bottom feeder? |
| I certainly feel that there's hope. The reason for the book's emphasis on technology is that the timetable of the mystery was February/March of 2000: the height of the NASDAQ bubble. Even by then, though, the market had realized that not all dot com companies were deserving of the high valuations that the market accorded them (often on the first day or so of trading). What investors had to remember was that even in a world where all the rules had supposedly changed, the traditional measures of winning and losing — namely, profitability — had never truly gone out of style. When Internet stocks were frothy, there were some terrific "sell" opportunities among companies with poor prospects. Today, following significant sell-offs for good and bad alike, the idea is to get back in to the companies with a proven source of revenue and earnings. That's the hope. If an Internet company is running out of money and unable to generate cash from its core business, I don't want its stock at any price. |
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As an author and former securities analyst, what do you hope investors and mystery lovers take away from A Killing? |
| I hope that investors realize that there's more to the stock market than mere numbers. Discipline, strategies, and even personalities are important contributors to market success. This book finds ways to underscore all of these points. The ultimate idea is to receive an investment education without even realizing it.
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