Pedal To The Metal

18462304 by
My Rating: 4/5 Stars

I liked this novel. Well, that might be a bit of an understatement. I really, really liked this novel. Probably not loved it, but I’m as proud of it as if it had been my own story. But then I love finance and interest rate fluctuations and bond markets and stock markets and financial analysis and market analysis and fundamental and technical analysis and trading and investing and growth opportunities and domestic along with overseas investing. And it doesn’t matter if we’re talking stocks or bonds or mutual funds or index funds, as long as that fucker is growing faster than the inflation rate. So it’s probably safe to say I like the thought of making fuckloads of money in the financial markets. Will I get there? Probably not. But I’m going to have a whole hell of a lot of fun trying.

Sure, I may have to forgo even the most basic sense of morality, but any good analyst worth his salt has the moral code of a politician involved in the latest sex scandal who was then discovered to be funded by both North Korea and the Chinese. Analysts may be arrogant little pissants who put money before God and country and the almighty dollar, but if I were to have a lobotomy to go along with my serious injection of badass, I might wipe the floor with more than a few Yale and Harvard grads and then kick the crap out of a few Stanford grads to round out the equation.

One day I’d like to strive for some real intuitive investigative work of the financial persuasion where I call out some seriously bad dudes who like to twiddle their thumbs and play with numbers all day. Even if it means I get smacked around in a bar fight, tossed into the middle of a war game field exercise, shoved on a plane headed to Detroit in the middle of the mother of all power outages, and stared down by the SecDef, I might still consider it a good investment, or then again, I might not. It’s really hard to say at this point.

I even like the military with its rules and regulations and lack of creative thinkers and checks and double-checks and inside-the-box thinking and command directives and statuesque tendencies where the orders come down from above with a finger and a fist pump and smiles are rather hard to come by and the general wheels around in a Humvee and if I’m lucky, I might get to see another sunrise tomorrow.

THE ASCENDANT bounced between finance and the military with effortless ease, tossed in China and Las Vegas and Wall Street and the Midwest for good measure, and cut and recut as this brisk, relentless ride never let up. I might have passed a missile silo or two in my rearview mirror, and a nuclear reactor might have been ready to explode in my vicinity, but I didn’t care, because it was pedal to the metal, baby, all the way to the finish line.

I received this book for free through NetGalley.