Twice Bitten, Once Shy: Confessions of a Fake Psychic Detective #5

Chapter 17

Contraction, Expansion, Trend

Zandra shuffles to the bathroom sink and runs the water cold. She cups the water in her hands.

I didn't do it.

She splashes the water on her face and watches herself in the mirror as the drops skid back into the sink.

Did I?

Zandra wipes her face with a towel and tries the door for good measure. It's locked, and no amount of jiggling or pushing or pulling is going to change that.

Returning to the bathroom, she lights up a cigarette and uses the sink as an ashtray.

Think.

The pounding of feet coming from the level above her cabin signal the event resumed.

"If anyone cares, I'm not sick. I'm down here," Zandra says to no one in particular. "You'll miss my demo on how to read stock charts. Kind of a twist on reading star charts in astrology. Really great. You're missing out."

Not that I knew what I would be doing at that demo anyway. I'm not a Wall Street investor, but I do know that stock prices do one of two things: go up and go down. There's a 50/50 chance that I'd make a correct prediction during my "psychic reading" of stock charts. Actually, it'd be better than 50/50. Stocks go up and down multiple times throughout the days, weeks, and months. I'd only need to be fuzzy about the timing in order to go from 50% odds to 99%.

The slap dicks who signed up for the demo thought I was going to make them rich. It's the other way around, because they signed off on giving me a percentage of any money they make.

Maybe there's a Wall Street investor in me after all.

Zandra drops the extinguished butt of the cigarette into the toilet. She hobbles to a shelf by the Murphy bed and pulls down the three-ring binder an attendee gave her.

"Three years of stock charts for a company called The Writer's Glove, LLC," Zandra says to an absent audience. She flips through the pages. "Stocks go up. Stocks go down. Not sure how anyone thinks there's more to it than that. The rest is gatekeeping financial jargon to keep Wall Street rich and everyone else in the dark."

The lines and boxes representing stock movements look random. A guide in the corner of one of the pages explains that the lines and boxes are called, "candlesticks." They show the opening price, closing price, highest price, and lowest price of a stock for a given time period, such as one day. The candlesticks condense all this information into a single design that looks similar to—as the name suggests—a candlestick, with wicks pointing up and down at either end of the wax.

I'm bored just thinking about this.

Despite that, Zandra can't bring herself to put the three-ring binder down yet. She plops down on the Murphy bed and continues looking through the charts.

Another guide on a page explains volume. Volume, expressed as a simple bar chart, shows the number of stocks that were traded over a period of time. On some days, The Writer's Glove, LLC, stock's volume went to about 1 million. That seems like a lot to Zandra until she spots a surge to 20 million.

That's a lot of money changing hands in one day.

The crash course in stocks shakes awake the part of Zandra's brain that's served her so well for so long. She starts making connections and noticing patterns.

The stock price goes up, the stock price goes down. Millions of stocks change hands in a single day, all trading the same company. That means millions of decisions, and millions more factors influencing those decisions, go into what happens to that stock on any given day. The variables and possibilities are almost infinite. That's why the charts look so chaotic.