Nothing gets a stockbroker’s eyes lit up like the green pixels that shine brightly as they load up their screen in the morning. Those fateful flickering lights on the screen, meaning nothing and meaning everything all at the same time. One speck of red on the screen could ruin a lifetime of green-tinted hard work, but one speck of green could rescue a bad day of blood red numbers. It’s a high risk game.
But the game is what Tyler Ainsworth loves. The adrenaline, the risk and the primal fear that we humans so love to replicate through progressively dangerous tasks. There’s little that comes close to that feeling of suspension over a void, over nothingness, than working the stock market.
It’s danger at it’s finest and you don’t even have to put your body on the line. Just everything you’ve built, and everything you will build. For Tyler, there’s only a degree of risk he’s willing to take. He might loves steep slopes and freshly minted money, but he’s no idiot — he’s all for adrenaline, not for taking a leap without knowing the slightest bit about what’s beyond.
A good quality for a stockbroker if you think about it. He would be pretty poor at his job if he let the adrenaline take over his rational brain and place money on whatever stocks that tickled his fancy. The job involves research, risk, yet more research and yet more risk. Tyler called it “harnessing the thrill”. Bit of an American turn of phrase — some things never change — but appropriate nonetheless.
So what does Tyler do to harness the thrill, as he calls it? Well in this strange, socially distanced times, he has to do most of his work from home. Wasn’t much a change really, at this stage of his career, Tyler worked from his swanky Richmond condo and there wasn’t much anyone could do about it. The too-big monitors in his office were where most of his attention was focussed; reclining on the shiny leather chair and letting his gaze wander across all the green and red lights flickering and changing across his line of vision.
He enjoys his home rather less than he should, all the fancy apartment facilities and instalments cast aside in favour of the three screens that attract all his attention. Causes a bit of disconnect from reality, those figures and numbers and lights. When you’re dealing with amounts on a daily basis that would widen the irises of most ‘normal’ people, it’s easy to lose the importance of what you’re looking at.
There’s real money behind those shiny pixels, real homes and jobs and assets. Tyler casting all that aside to invest in a cold, unbiased manner is what makes him so good at his job. But there are darker sides to all that draining distance; the black mirror that gazes back as the lights go out and there’s nothing to look at but your reflection.
But then the lights come on again and the microsecond of introspection is nothing but a flutter of wings in a snowstorm. The fact that the flutter might have consequences down the road is just that — down the road. Nothing to be dealt with right now. Living in the present is what Tyler is the best at — the future derives from the here and now, doesn’t it?
The future seems to be getting uncomfortably close though. What was one day a mildly interesting news story about a some sort of virus in China that Tyler read while sipping coffee on his commute, turned into this horrible pandemic that meant he had to drink his coffee from the comfort of his balcony instead. The affects are felt by the many, not the few. But sometimes the few are hurt in ways more significant than simply not being allowed to leave their gilded palaces. Or condos.
The stock market crash affected Tyler more than most. Ironically, his proudly risky move of investing in burgeoning hospitality companies backfired. Spectacularly, his colleagues would add behind his back. There weren’t many places to go relax at when COVID hit; the ones that were available were in walking distance. The promising entities that Tyler had so boldly staked his funds on didn’t have the cash flow to survive when their whole business model had been made (temporarily) irrelevant. One risk too many.
It’s always one too many when you’re taking so many of them on a daily basis. With his eyes glued to his multiple flickering skills, maybe he forgot what the world outside was like. A growing virus, a stock market bubble, the world becoming less confident in new companies. Little things the old Tyler would’ve noticed but this one, this unassailable one, was too wrapped up in the game to take into account.
The game, isn’t that what he always called it. The game of dives and climbs and peaks and troughs. Too many dives and troughs and not enough climbs and troughs. He had to do something else, the stockbroking wasn’t providing the dividends, nor the risk that was so potent before — on a more practical level, this condo he rarely appreciated didn’t come for free.
There was a new game in town though that Tyler was gravitating towards. It was something he came across when he was gazing at his spare screen while looking at how his investments were panning out. An email from a client; they had acquired a not-insignificant fortune from something called dropship and wanted to invest in. He’d usually give them an obligatory glance and swiftly focus his attention back on the things that needed it. But not this time.
The word piqued his curiosity even more than the many zeros in the number the client wanted to invest. A rare occurrence, rarely is anything more important than raw numbers to Tyler Ainsworth. Dropship though, he had to check this out when he had a free minute.
The free minute he’d so casually filed away in his mind came almost a day later, at his self designated lunchtime. This was anytime he could be bothered to get off the chair and order something from UberEats, COVID be damned. Just as he was about to press pay on his katsu curry, Tyler figured he might as well go get it himself. Bit of time to think about this dropship thing and he’d fool himself into thinking he’s working. Oh, and exercise, but that’s down the list of priorities.
A little jaunt along the Thames would do him good; picking at his curry while being distracted by all the dropship information he was processing. The company that his client worked with seemed legitimate, with a fancy website and everything. A polished website may just be a façade, of course, but more often than not it’s a pretty good sign. It’s worth a risk. It’s always worth a risk in Tyler’s book.
His day job was slowing down. few people wanted to invest in this day and age, fewer still wanted to invest with someone with a reputation for unnecessary risks. Still he felt his methods were flawless, they’d served him well all these years after all. Flawed reasoning in hindsight, but hindsight is always perfect after all.
Tyler jumped onto the dropship train with all the gusto and vigour of someone who’d forgotten what something new feels like. Something fresh, something risky, not just numbers on a computer, pixels on a screen. But that’s how he treated dropship — mere numbers he could manipulate to get money.
The dropshipper had insisted he do his proper research before setting up a website and all the necessary bells and whistles. They can’t force anyone’s hand, though. In sheer excitement, and pride in his abilities, Tyler had jumped straight in and set up the fanciest website he could. The more expensive the better right? Wrong, at least as far as dropship is concerned.
This was just another expensive game surely— with products, instead of numbers. Advertise, sell, profit. But it wasn’t that easy. As Tyler would know if he’d read the rather short briefing his dropshipper had sent him, he had to know his niche and what products would do best with his particular clientele. He knew neither, just that this form of business was doing well and he didn’t wanna miss the train. It was risk at its worst — uncalculated, taking a leap without knowing what you’re leaping into.
It was smooth sailing at first. It’s a wonder the good a fancy website and paid advertising can do for your business. Orders started flooding it, but he could barely keep up with the returns and refunds. It wasn’t something he’d considered when his singleminded focus was getting this dropship company off the ground and putting shiny green numbers into his bank account. It wasn’t meant to be this hard — the dropshipper does all the work, he takes the risk and lets the process do its job.
To make things more difficult, the flow of customers slowed down to a trickle as the paid advertising tailed off and the shiny new website wasn’t shiny enough, or new enough. The essence of a dropshipping business is the product selection and he hadn’t curated that — simply placing the products he found pleasing and hoping the customers shared his immaculate taste. Another risk that didn’t pan out, even if he didn’t look at it that way.
One too many. Not enough research and forethought and too much blind risk taking — not the best combination. Tyler Ainsworth turned out to be very much assailable.