Chapter 504: Chapter 276: Final Gains (Part 2)
The days of swagger and arrogance are gone. He didn’t wear a tie; the collar of his expensive Brioni custom shirt was unbuttoned, two buttons undone, and his meticulously groomed hairstyle was somewhat disheveled. His eyes appeared sunken, filled with menacing red streaks.
In front of him lay an empty Glenfiddich whiskey glass and a half-crumpled pack of cigarettes. He resembled a gambler who had experienced the ups and downs of life in a casino, only to end up losing all his chips, filled with regret and unwillingness.
Matty Singh seemed unusually excited. He still sat in his penthouse study overlooking the nightscape of Los Angeles, but at the moment, he wasn’t drinking. Instead, he kept using a pen to make annoying "tap, tap" sounds on the desk.
There was a morbid gleam in his eyes, the kind only lawyers exhibit when they sniff out a high-profile lawsuit. He was like a vulture that smelled blood, waiting to feast on the corpse.
Meanwhile, Brian Lorde remained the emperor. His backdrop was the study of a vacation house in the Swiss Alps, with an abstract painting by Gerhard Richter hanging on the wall, and a tranquil, pristine snow scene outside the window.
He wore a dark turtleneck cashmere sweater, his expression calm and unperturbed, showing no emotion. But his deep-set eyes scanned the faces of the other three like the highest precision scanning instrument.
It was Brian who first broke the silence.
"It seems that nobody slept well last night." Brian’s voice was as bland as discussing the weather, yet carried a sense of power to start the discussion, "Scoot, you start. Take stock of your results."
Scoot took a deep breath, his face filled with complex emotions, a sense of relief after disaster, regret at missing huge profits, and deep self-blame for failing to adhere entirely to discipline.
"Lin gave me the exit signal when the price broke 400 while I was in a meeting. The stock price had just broken 180 US Dollars right before the meeting! I understood what Lin meant by this call; he wanted to say if I didn’t exit now, don’t blame him for the loss."
"I held out for an hour, and finally, at 520 US Dollars, I immediately instructed the trading team to initiate a highest-priority liquidation protocol."
"But..." he revealed a trace of bitterness, "the market... was crazier than we imagined."
"Just as we started selling, the stock price not only didn’t stop, it continued to sprint upward like crazy! 550 US Dollars... 580 US Dollars... it even briefly touched 600 US Dollars!"
"At that moment, I wavered." Scoot admitted frankly, his voice full of struggle, "Watching the screen as tens of millions in profit increased every second, my brain was screaming, telling me that Lin might’ve made a misjudgment!"
"I... I couldn’t completely control my own greed."
"I instructed the trading team to pause the sale of the last third of the position. I thought... I thought I’d take another look, even if it was just waiting ten more minutes. I even felt we could charge towards 700 US Dollars."
He closed his eyes in pain, his voice hoarse with suppressed anger, "And then, Robin Hood, that son of a bitch, pulled the plug on the internet!"
His tone was like describing a natural disaster, "Everything was over. One second, buy orders were like a tsunami, surging. The next second, the public market buy orders, a torrent formed by countless individual investors, vanished instantly!"
"Although our institutional channels were still open, the civilian water taps were cut off, the entire market ecosystem dead! Liquidity completely dried up."
"Our trading interface was left with overwhelming sell orders, but no buyers willing to take them! The stock price plunged like a free fall, with no support!"
He laughed self-deprecatingly, "That last third of the position in our hands, at that moment, transformed into a block of gold sinking rapidly into the sea. You can see it, but simply can’t move it!"
"Eventually, my personal account, a total investment of 5 million dollars, the first two-thirds was successfully cashed out at an average high of 610 US Dollars, totaling approximately 67.8 million dollars. It was a fantastical start."
"But the remaining third..." he stared at the document, each word seemed squeezed out through clenched teeth.
"After the collapse, it took us an entire hour to barely find an institutional counterpart willing to take it at around an average of 150 US Dollars, completing the liquidation. That part only recovered 8.3 million dollars."
"Total cashed out was 76.1 million dollars, net profit 71.1 million dollars."
"Justin’s side was exactly the same. We both invested a total of 30 million dollars, the first two-thirds of the position cashed out approximately 406 million US Dollars."
"But the remaining third, those 333,000 shares, in its peak moment the market value neared 200 million dollars, but ultimately, only recovered less than 50 million dollars."
He raised his head, his eyes bloodshot, filled with endless remorse and anger, "Two accounts, a total cash-out of approximately 532 million dollars, net profit 497 million."
"This figure, sounds grand, doesn’t it? But because of my final greed, because Wall Street shamelessly overturned the table, our more than 150 million dollars in profit on the book, just... evaporated!"
Brian made no comment, only turning his gaze towards Matty.
Matty stopped tapping on the desk, grinned, but there was a hint of relief and uncontrollable delight in his smile.
"I did better than Scoot because I’m afraid of dying, even more afraid of the SEC. So I bought call options, the time value of options is the devil, and I didn’t want to stay even a second longer."
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