The Bulls, The Bears and the Bea’s Knees: The Inspiration Behind The Trade Off

I’m not a finance person. When I decided to apply to business schools for an MBA, my mom refused to believe I didn’t mean a master’s degree in journalism or creative writing. Even after business school, I found the stock market boring. That changed in January of 2021.

 The stock of a failing video game retailer, GameStock, made headline news because of its sudden dramatic rise, the chaos that created in the market, and the drama surrounding the specific investors. It was cast as a tale of the bad rich guy – a very successful hedge fund manager who was shorting the stock, versus the good every-men – a group of amateur investors who banded together on reddit to drive up GameStop’s stock price. In the stock market one can go from poor to rich and back again over the course of a single day. But GameStop was framed squarely as rich equals bad and poor equals good. To me, this seemed like an oversimplification, a fallacy in the perception of fortune. Suddenly Wall Street, with its optimistic bulls and pessimistic bears, interested me – at least as a setting to examine the complex morality of wealth. 

Despite my MBA, I barely understood short selling and assumed that it was a contemporary strategy – like junk bonds, or hedge funds or SPACs. Turns out I was wrong. People have been shorting stocks for as long as the market has existed. One famous investor, Jesse Livermore, even made millions shorting the Great Crash of 1929. Shorting the Great Crash? What a concept! The idea that someone had predicted the crash of the market that put the entire country in a great depression and had profited from it, was un-imaginable. This was the story I wanted to use to explore the inherent moral conflict I saw in the GameStop short squeeze.

I like to write about strong women fighting for a place in a man’s world, so I knew my protagonist would be a woman. At first, I thought I might invent a fictional wife for Livermore (following the pattern of what I’d done with The Lobotomist’s Wife). Livermore was a poor kid who made his fortune from nothing but a quick mathematical mind and a keen sense for the market. His trading strategies are still referenced today, and the fictional Reminisces of a Stock Operator, which is his thinly veiled biography, is required reading for new hires at many investment banks. 

Still, by the 1920s Livermore had become part of Wall Street’s inner circle of rich fat cats who manipulated the market for their own gain, in the days before regulation, at the expense of the multitude of average joes who were investing in the “unstoppable” market, for the first time. He was reinforcing evidence for what I was trying to argue against – not all short sellers are rich or bad. I liked Livermore’s early history, but I didn’t like who he became, so I created someone I did like. Bea Abramovitz. 

The 1920s was an era of extreme liberation for women, they had just gained the ability to vote, they wore shapeless clothing and eschewed undergarments, they smoked and drank and were proudly single. But Wall Street was different. I was shocked (although I shouldn’t have been) to learn that whereas men could come from any background and not even have a college degree to work at a bank, women had to be wealthy socialites, educated at one of the Seven Sisters schools, valuable to the bank for their connections. Furthermore, while several of the big-name banks were founded and run by Jewish men, Wall Street was essentially barren of Jewish women. So, what would happen, I wondered, if a poor Jewish woman with skills like Livermore’s tried to make it on Wall Street? And I had my story.

With Bea, I got to write my favorite kind of heroine, a strong, smart, scrappy woman struggling to hold on to her sense of self, while trying to blaze a trail in a man’s world.  Her motivation for becoming (spoiler alert) a short seller, is not evil, it is driven by what she sees happening in the market. And by her family’s own complex relationship to money. It is not easy to be a contrarian in the stock market even if you’re not a Jewish woman, and struggles and almost loses faith in herself along the way. She serves as a reminder that by standing by one’s beliefs and identity, and trusting oneself, we will end up in the best possible place. Or as the flappers would say, as the bee’s knees.

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Samantha Greene Woodruff has a BA in history from Wesleyan University and an MBA from the NYU Stern School of Business. She became a novelist by accident and cannot believe her luck. Sam spent fifteen years putting her MBA to decent use at Viacom’s Nickelodeon, before leaving corporate life to become a full-time mom. In her newfound “free” time, she tried her hand at fiction writing at the Writing Institute at Sarah Lawrence College. It was here that she found her true calling as a historical fiction author, a job that she believes perfectly combines her multifaceted background with her wild imagination and passion for history, reading, and writing. Sam’s debut novel, The Lobotomist’s Wife, was an #1 Amazon bestseller and First Reads pick. Her writing has appeared in Newsweek, Writer’s Digest, Female First, Read 650 and more. Her second novel, The Trade Off, will be released in the Fall of 2024 by Lake Union.

Sam lives in southern Connecticut with her husband, two children, two dogs and a small reptile zoo. In her current “free” time she can be found in the yoga studio, at a concert, singing Taylor Swift at the top of her lungs in the car, or out for a long walk with a friend.

THE TRADE OFF

A brilliant and ambitious young woman strives to find her place amid the promise and tumult of 1920s Wall Street in a captivating historical novel by the author of The Lobotomist’s Wife.

Bea Abramovitz has a gift for math and numbers. With her father, she studies the burgeoning Wall Street market’s stocks and patterns in the financial pages. After college she’s determined to parlay her talent for the prediction game into personal and professional success. But in the 1920s, in a Lower East Side tenement, opportunities for women don’t just come knocking. Bea will have to create them.

It’s easier for her golden-boy twin brother, Jake, who longs to reclaim all their parents lost after fleeing the pogroms in Russia to come to America. Well intentioned but undisciplined, Jake has a charm that can carry him only so far on Wall Street. So Bea devises a plan. They’ll be a secret team, and she’ll be the brains behind the broker. As Jake’s reputation, his heedless ego, and the family fortune soar, Bea foresees catastrophe: an impending crash that could destroy everything if she doesn’t finally take control.

Inspired by the true story of a pioneering investment legend, The Trade Off is a powerful novel about identity, sacrifice, family loyalties, and the complex morality of money.

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Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing