THE BALLAD OF THE MEME STOCK TRADER

“Hey Seb! Where are you? Don’t you leave me now too!”

The elderly widow, Mrs Lieberman, with her glaucoma sun glasses steamed up from the mask wrapped round her gaunt face had been searching all night for her missing cat, nearly shaving nine of her own lives off in the process. She had only just conceded defeat for now, returning to her apartment in the Bronx, exhausted and defeated by her exertions.

From high above she was being watched over by an angel.

An angel with a dirty face.

It was late summer in Brooklyn and the familiar sound of Sinatra’s Summer Wind was playing from a blue tooth speaker at an Empanada food stall just outside of Lucio’s apartment window. As a lapsed Puerto Rican catholic, he was ashamed to admit that he knew the lyrics to the song better than the Lord’s prayer but then again Ol’ Blue Eyes was a deity to most New Yorkers worth their salt.

Memories of his mother giving him his first licks of her ice cream came to mind as “like painted kites, those days and nights they went flyin’ by. The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky,” reverberated all around the street, broken only occasionally by the sound of what seemed like a sped up ambulance flying toward some unseen emergency. Lucio always did the sign of the cross whenever he heard an ambulance siren. It was his way of doing his bit for his fellow New Yorkers.

As a warm, tropical-like breeze swept across his face, he pined for the old New York, the one that hadn’t had all the life zapped out of it like a broken down fruit machine. Sometimes he felt like he might be the last one to turn the lights out on his beloved city, so dark and oppressive did it seem these days since the arrival of COVID19.

For some the decline of New York was a direct result of the COVID19 pandemic, but Lucio felt the rot had set in long before, decades even. 9/11 was the most obvious divider that most people could recognise historically as a turning point in the city’s direction of travel, visually, culturally and spiritually. Lucio saw that murderous act as his generation’s JFK assassination, a day when even blue skies and sunshine could be tarnished by evil doers. Nothing was spared in the shadow of the attack, not even Lucio’s unremitting optimism which took a temporary leave of absence for a year or two after the event.

He’d lost some good friends that day and still raised a toast to them every September in his favourite local bar “Salute” with a ‘Brooklyn’ cocktail. He didn’t always like to admit it, but Lucio was both a romantic and a sentimentalist which is probably why he never became a fully fledged Wolf of Wall Street. He was essentially an old school bookie, the kind you might see in an old black and white movie with Bogart or Cagney in, and one who knew how to mix it with the power brokers of the money market. In some ways he felt like an anachronistic stereotype of the city in human form with his broad accent and exaggerated hand gestures. “Get da fuck outta here” and a “Go fuck your mother” were common phrases he often deployed from his tool box of authentic Brooklyn-style vernacular. Now Brooklyn was fully gentrified, he’d found a place in the Bronx which was also now under attack from over-priced coffee shops and plant-based food stalls.

He wondered if he might one day offer tourists his own unique tours of the Big Apple, complete with unsavoury stories of the mafia, political corruption and comical tales of his own from growing up on the street. It would be one way to keep the culture alive. He took pride in being a man of the people, who also had the ear of the top brass.

Having big ears was also a distinct advantage for Lucio, especially for gleaning nuggets of information in unlikely places. So what if he was once called “Dumbo” in school; he had turned his seeming defects into assets and made his living from “knowing things”. He sometimes wondered if Knowing Things might be his Native American name in another life.

Back when he was at school, he used to run bets for his class mates and one English teacher, who had a Hemmingway type of relationship with the booze. As a young lad, Lucio had learnt all his tricks from his Uncle Mort who’d frequently take him to the horse track and teach him about such things as ‘shortening the odds’ and ‘smart money’.

After a year or two of this illegitimate education, nothing else made much sense to the young boy, corrupted by his gambling Uncle.

He came to learn it was a way of life and one he had the perfect sensibility for.

Gregarious, optimistic and perceptive.

And yet, with all the accelerating events of the 21st century he felt less at home in the city that never sleeps.

He tried to remember if he had even slept himself lately. Days and nights had smashed right into one another and entire weeks had become indistinguishable from one to the next. He lived vicariously through the trading markets. When a day of business ended in London, he would only just be half-way through a day of trading in New York. The rhythm of his body and mind were adjusted to the energy of Global finance. In this way he considered himself ‘a citizen of the World’, just like Rick in Casablanca, his favourite movie of all time.

And similar to Rick, there was an Ilsa but Maria Romano was now married to his arch-nemesis from junior high, Anthony DeFazio, who had been on the New York City Council for at least a decade now as well as being a congressional aide with designs on becoming the mayor sooner rather than later. The pandemic had played perfectly into DeFazio's authoritarian tendencies and Lucio feared that the city would only see more of this controlling creep in the future. He'd always thought DeFazio was a scumbag. His insidious political ambition only further proved his initial suspicions back at school correct.

Speaking of scumbags, Lucio had also been called that epithet many times himself. He certainly was no angel.

Having finished a short stretch in jail, Lucio had promised to make amends for various wrong doings with his numerous scams and long cons, including an accidental misrepresentation of a famous betting company falsely advertised on his first gambling website start up.

The trouble was his brain; he could see angles and plays in everything he did.

Except when it came to love and then he fell short. But in fact, all his hustling was all a way to get to Maria. His one unified desire and purpose in life was to win the hand of the only woman he truly loved. But as the decades rolled on and he was increasingly getting some white in his beard the recognition that he might be losing this quest was becoming a tangible reality for him to have to acknowledge. And if that terrible day finally came, he knew he would lose whatever luck he had been holding onto like a raft boat out at sea. She was the reason he took the risks, and attempted to climb the financial mountains. But he had to be himself winning her back. He was never going to be one of the “big suit wearing mother fuckers”. He was a white t-shirt and sweat pants kind of guy and things like that weren’t going to change for anyone. Except maybe Maria, but he kind of hoped she would overlook it at the expense of her undying love for him.

A lover of adventures stories since young, he currently thought of himself like the Count of Monte Cristo, emerging from his own island prison similar to that of Château d’If except it being the Vernon C. Bain correctional center anchored just off the Bronx’s southern shore, preparing his redemptive arc to fortune and glory.

Having recently handing in his sea legs Lucio was now getting used to being back on the street, the place he knew best. He often woke up at night thinking he was still back on the prison ship surrounded by his fellow inmates, and then he would breathe a sign of relief knowing he was a free man, in a manner of speaking.

“What is free these days? They’d tax the air we breathe if they could. Maybe they will.” Lucio argued one night to a purple nosed wino sitting next to him at Salute, barely able to keep his red eyes open as Lucio held court.

Having lost all of his money paying back the victims of his “accidental fraud”, Lucio was having to start over with a new plan.

The road to riches for Lucio was pathed with good intentions, except it was no longer on the trading floors of Wall Street where the action was taking place, but on his phone, on a trading app.

After the controversial American election toward the tail end of 2020, a people’s revolution had started to emerge from out of all the toxic political acrimony, and took hold of a new paradigm in trading in the early months of the new year 2021, like a bad mouthed younger brother of the ‘Occupy Wall Street’ movement. In this instance the revolutionaries of this new movement wanted to get rich while sticking it to the man, whereas ‘Occupy Wall Street’ seemed to have been born out of the bored, bourgeois children of the ruling class who simply enjoyed 'pretend' slumming with their boho-chic like extras out of a Batman movie and creating anarchy for fun.

Lucio had no time for mindless anarchy. He was a pro-free trade/entrepreneur who occasionally channeled his childhood hero Robin Hood, by enabling those around him with opportunities to change their life through financial empowerment.

And now opportunities appeared to have become manifest in multiple ways.

In layman’s terms these opportunities were called “meme stocks” and their success depended upon the momentum of online traders using predominantly trading apps on their mobile phones and solidifying the base of support (mostly online) around agreed upon stocks.

This war of trade was fast moving, changing by the day, Hell by the minute. With the advent of mobile trading, there had been an acceleration and democratisation for buying stocks and shares for the average blue collar type. But it wasn’t just for those who’d never mastered the language of money before, but also those who’d fallen afoul of Wall Street itself and wanted their own form of revenge or career rehabilitation. As it happened, those with a vast wealth of experience in trading the old school way, were now able to pass on their wisdom to the unintiated and the kids who’d only just begun earning pocket money from mowing the lawn. In fact, there was a family being born, and it knew no race, gender, religion or self-identity of any sorts. It’s one common denominator was money. Self-empowerment through financial gain. And in Lucio’s mind there was nothing wrong with that. Everyone should be entitled to a shot at the big time. And he and the other ‘degenerates’ as they had jokingly and collectively self-identified were shooting for the moon.

But with great power comes great responsibility as Peter Parker's Uncle Ben famously once said and somehow Lucio had quickly become caught up in this new paradigm. With his battle scars from his past financial adventures, he had developed a cult following online where he had casually started recording videos from his phone and uploading them to his social media accounts. Pretty soon, like an avalanche, he had become a cult phenomenon and a kind of surrogate father/uncle to the meme stock community, a digital Fagin of sorts. Being childless himself, he never expected to parent quite so many, at such a rate.

Over the course of the year, the gains had been insane at times, but with market manipulation from the hedge funds, no-one's gains were safe at any stage, unless they’d already cashed out early. But the big day, the MOASS (Mother of all Short Squeezes) that had been calculated by the inner-circle “experts” was the one that every man, woman and pimply nosed teenager holding these stocks was holding out for.

Now, at the end of the summer, the manipulation and financial voodoo being carried out by the powers that be were rattling the nerves of the “family” and sometimes it felt to Lucio as if he was carrying the weight of the entire community on his shoulders.

He had been trying to calm the nerves of his many acolytes hanging on his each and every word. It worried him at times that a slip of the tongue here or there might result in the suicide of one of his devotees, so precarious and volitile were the stocks they were buying into. Was he liable in such a possibility? He tried not to think about it too much. It frightened him somewhere deep down. And then, yet again, he had nearly taken his life so many times in the past, he had to be more hard nosed about the fate of others. He expected his followers to be smarter than that anyway. He was mindful at all times to make sure they were aware of the risks. He couldn’t tie their shoelaces for them even if he had told them what shoes to wear, financially speaking.

He had won too much and lost too much to care about the value of things as other people did. He knew these were hard times and people were justified in looking for a way to break their poverty with a short cut life hack.

Walking round with thousands of followers in your pocket, hanging on your every word is quite some power. Some days, Lucio felt like a God, other days like a fraud.

He tried to keep himself grounded by watching the ducks on Central Park lake, feeding them with pizza crust and white bread that had gone stale from his makeshift bread bin back home.

Watching the ducks glide across the smooth surface of Central Park lake gave him all the spirituality he needed.

He remembered that classic episode of 'The Sopranos' when mafia boss Tony became fretful at the departure of the ducks that had made their brief home in his swimming pool.

Lucio knew these ducks weren’t going anywhere. They were just like him. Lazy.

He’d been hatching a plan to leave New York but firstly he needed to take care of his current play.

His best friend Travis had told him once that he was the Wall Street Don Quixote, forever tilting at financial windmills. Lucio's Dulcinea was happily married and settled down now, but he still said a prayer to her every night, and signed off each of his YouTube videos with a message to her personally. Perhaps in the hope that she might see his crazy efforts to win her heart after all these years.

Or perhaps she wouldn’t even remember him.

“Night Maria! Our ship’s coming in baby! I wouldn’t lie to you.”

But storm clouds were gathering in the city, both literally and existentially.

The big play was under direct attack and was being besieged by all sorts of 'funny games' that threatened Lucio and the ‘degenerates’ big day in the sun. Those who withstood the brunt of the ladder attacks designed to depreciate the share price were called 'diamond hands', because they had a high risk tolerance for high volitility stocks. Those who got jittery at a sudden downwards slide with their chosen stock were called 'paper hands' because they had an adversion to the volatility.

As much as Lucio was holding his nerve, he could also forsee some catalysmic event sabotaging everything he and the 'family' had been working towards.

But nevertheless, he remained steadfast and determined as 'diamond handed', they moved forward like a renegade band of brothers and sisters.

This was warfare of a kind.

The play in question had only opened up because of the pandemic. Hedge funds hoping to make money of a sure fire liquidated company such as movie theatre chain AMC had spectacularly backfired after the regular folks had bought shares into them, creating the financial equivalent of a human shield around the organisation.

Watching on as DiFazio helped implement more restrictions on the people of the city, Lucio felt he was in some ways counteracting him by helping some of those same people regain a form of freedom in financial independence.

But it all depended on the play.

Would it come off? Or fall off a cliff?

War-gaming the worst case scenarios he still felt strongly there was little chance outside of excessive illegal manipulation (akin to that of the 2008 housing bubble) that this wouldn’t ultimately pay off for him and his followers in the end.

A super-sized moon was hanging over New York City, “as full as a gypsy’s bra” as Uncle Mort used to joke in his off-colour way.

“Sebby! Sebby! Come on baby! I want you home and safe. Don’t keep hiding like this. You’ll break my heart.”

From outside his bedroom window, Lucio could hear Mrs Lieberman searching for her cat again.

He wondered how safe it was for a woman of her age to be out all night in a city that had bigger sleeping issues than he did.

But like a lot of New Yorkers, if they’d made it this far, they could surely go a little further.