It Seems As It May

by Andy Hicks

The eyes only see what the mind is prepared to accept. When first-year investment banker, Sara Banski, is assigned to a high-profile IPO for a promising drug company, she must navigate her way through reality and perception, honesty and subterfuge. As a blue-collar girl tossed into a white-collar world, she finds herself questioning everything. Not only has her smarmy boss at TJ Carnegie Inc., one of New York City's prestigious investment banks, romantically wooed her, but her drunken father has somehow profited from a mysterious hedge fund and her good friend has just committed suicide. Tears are shed when she finds out they are all interconnected, and redemption is her personal battle cry.

Digging deeper into the IPO, Sara uncovers an elaborate scheme that would destroy the credibility of the stock market if ever divulged. Despite threats of personal ruin, she uses the inner-workings of the financial system to expose a tightly-knit conspiracy of manipulation, and the world is watching.

272 pages, Paperback

First published December 22, 2011

About the author

Andy Hicks has worked as an equity trader and analyst in San Francisco for more than a decade. He has been published in Working-Money.com, and regularly contributes to ZeroHedge.com and Marketwatch.com's Trading Deck.

His work experience has uniquely qualified him to embed this novel with shocking details about a system of interlocked banks, hedge funds, and corporations; facts that are untold by the media.

Reviews

[Ms.pegasus · Rating 3 out of 5]

The appeal of this unusual melodrama is its dodgy accounting backdrop. The main character, Sara Banski, fresh out of college, is recruited by a boutique investment bank. Sara is all too eager to embrace the “real world.” Of course, the reader is a bit more skeptical, and even Sara has to question her good fortune. Why, despite her inexperience, is she given a lead role in an important and potentially lucrative IPO as her first assignment? Her task is to lead the “due diligence” phase, and the intriguing elements begin to unfold. We hear about rebates being booked as “soft sales,” shell companies in the Cayman Islands, “smurfing,” Dutch auctions, “Chinese Walls,” and the architecture of insider trading conspiracies (it's far more subtle than whispering: “Blue horseshoe likes....” Needless to say, I come from an accounting background and savored the authentic feel of these elements woven into the plot and setting this book apart from the typical potboiler.

Unfortunately, the weakness of this book lies with the characters. The narrative is in third person. Hicks relies on description rather than dialogue through the opening chapters and it feels forced and deliberate, like a film overly reliant on voice-over narrative for its exposition. It takes a while for him to ease comfortably into his story. The characters, Sara, and her college friends, lack dimension. It is only during the action-filled denouement that these problems begin to recede into the background. At that point, a “don't get mad, get even,” mentality ignites the plot with a kind of cinematic momentum.

I'm not sure how this got on my reading list, but it was an interesting adventure, and a pleasant jaunt into escapism.

NOTE: I read this on the Kindle, and they really did the author a disservice. The numbered chapters are not indexed, so that it is impossible to navigate using the chapter control. (I tend to jump around a lot when reading because I take notes; readers who simply read and bookmark, especially with the newer generation of devices, should have no problem).