“Like, what? Skydiving?”
“I was thinking more… stocks and investing.”
“Oh. Well, I mean… I’m invested. But I don’t actually handle that. I have a guy, and he does mostly low-risk investments for me. Building up a retirement kind of thing.”
“Would you be open to an experiment?” he asked, taking the plates and heading toward the kitchen.
“What kind of experiment?”
“I give you a hundred—”
“I don’t need your money.”
To that, he shot me a raised-brow look. “How about you hear me out before you decide?”
“Fine.”
“If I give you a hundred thousand to play with.”
“Play with?”
“In the market.”
“I don’t know anything about the market.”
“You can learn. It’s all just odds and research. With a healthy dose of good instincts. The same kind of thing you picked up on that made you good at poker.”
“You understand that you could be losing a hundred-thousand dollars.”
“Life is risk.”
“Said like someone who never had to worry about money.”
“Let’s not pretend that we are from such different worlds. True, we had very different upbringings, but you grew up with money too.”
He wasn’t wrong.
It wasn’t old, generational wealth. But we’d never struggled. The money was always there.
“I’m not looking at this like you’re throwing away money. I’m looking at it the way my family looked at handing me the business once they were gone. A gamble. Trust. A chance to prove oneself.”
“Why?”
“To humor me.”
“What’s in it for me?”
“Aside from whatever money you make?” he asked as he started to empty the dishwasher.
“Yeah.”
He paused, a mug in his hands, considering.
“If you can grow the initial investment by fifteen to twenty percent in under sixty days, I’ll sign your papers.”
I didn’t know a lot about trading. But fifteen to twenty percent seemed aggressive as hell.
But my poker brain leaned forward, already stacking chips. Because fifteen percent wasn’t impossible. And I was really good at beating odds.
