(Excerpt)
As the week wound down, there was still no call from Richard. Finally Eteo called the big broker at Canarim, but the conversation didn’t leave him feeling any better. He decided to pull out all his buying orders and leave the company on its own for a while to see where it would end up going, but almost at once Richard called from Calgary to complain that Eteo had left the stock without any support. Eteo replied acidly that his clients weren’t there to support anybody’s market, pointing out that they invested in the hope of making a profit. This was a response Richard didn’t like at all, but he kept on insisting that the shares would soon “go to the moon,” a cliché promoters used when they didn’t have anything concrete to offer a stockbroker.
The conversation reminded Eteo that Richard was one of those promoters who rarely had anything of value to say to a broker. His stock-in-trade was nonsensical statements such as “it’s going to five dollars” or “this is the best-ever deal” or “you won’t need to get into anything else for the rest of your life” or “this is the one,” phrases Eteo had heard more times than he could remember, especially from the unscrupulous promoters Vancouver had been famous for back in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. Eteo had seen them all, from his early days until now, the promoters who walked the streets with a few certificates in their briefcases ready to offer grease, as they called it, in other words free shares to brokers or other promoters to persuade unsuspecting investors to come in. Profitability depended on the stage of the game at which the investor entered and whether other investors would come in afterwards and perhaps relieve him of his position, sometimes at a profit. And there were cases when the profit had been pretty good. Eteo had sometimes bought in at pennies, say between 10 and 50 cents per share, and then watched other investors come in after him and drive the price to a dollar or more. This hadn’t been unusual in those days.
Eteo also spent part of the week looking into Lionsgate Entertainment and movie financing in general,and although he didn’t become an expert, he learned enough to decide to invest half a dozen clients’ accounts into the stock. It was still at a half-decent level, and Eteo knew Frankie well enough to feel confident he would make a good go of the startup. In time this would prove to be right. Eventually the price of the shares quadrupled and clients who had invested in it made a killing. The next time Eteo met Frankie, he mentioned to him that he had invested in Lionsgate. Frankie was delighted, not because of the few thousand shares Eteo had bought, which made little difference to him or to the price of the shares, but because it made him appreciate how much Eteo trusted his judgement.
Mayanaam
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