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The Schuyler Fortune V: Rose-2
The same space problem encountered before the Museum was built had not improved, however, so five floors of rental space were found near the southwest corner of Central Park. Two floors were modified with the best connections to the trust's trading floor broker at the NYSE and to the trust's wholly owned market maker.
It had a large war room with both desk monitors and terminals for each individual broker and overhead large high-definition monitors in easy ergonomic view, all connected by optical fiber links with the two Dell Pearcey-like cluster supercomputers in Wyoming and Ross Pharmaceuticals in Pennsylvania.
Marcus had an open office where most day-to-day trading decisions were made and a conference room for analyst presentations and a well-organized, formal office for quieter work. He hired the best brokers of his acquaintance in the city, executive assistants who loved to mentor, a catering staff for the mob of employees, an experienced cleaning staff, a complete human resources department and an in-house legal department. The security staff was bonded and experienced to supplement the security staff in the lobby, many floors below.
Marcus sat one morning in the conference room with the broker supervisors, the controller and the directors of the departments of the Blossom Fund. Several items on the agenda needed to be reviewed with them and comments solicited. Over coffee and muffins, they tackled one item at a time.
First and foremost, Marcus wanted to convey work expectations to the fund employees.
He told them that he valued on-time work arrival times, discussion of business matters at the office only, paying attention primarily to their duties while at work, and continuing broker education was on his mind.
The benefit package for the employees was stupendous. There was an employee agreement to fund all health and dental costs up front, including medications, eyeglasses every six months, and hearing aids if needed. Free substance abuse rehabilitation was included.
Marcus told them they could present two options to brokers who came in with hangovers in the morning: another job or rehab, broker's choice. The work required clear minds.
Six weeks of paid leave each year, a five-thousand-dollar vacation bonus each year, 401(k) matching dollars for dollar vesting after a year, paid relocation expenses, student loans paid in full, and six weeks paid sick time each year, were included.
The fund paid for long-term care insurance for each employee and their spouse and after three years of service, the employee and spouse/partner both were vested for life in that benefit.
The employees paid for their own fiduciary bond and the fund paid for their state license and education each year.
In return, Marcus expected hard work, attention to detail, finishing their task lists daily when possible, courteous behavior and collegiality with professionalism.
He expected them to have his back. He told the supervisors that he was allergic to surprises from employees, including them. He was open, he said, to constructive criticism and did not ever expect to hear, or hear about, personal discussion outside of the lunchroom.
He expected professional attire, cleanliness and professional grooming and outlined what he meant by those phrases. The image of the fund in New York City, he felt, was different than the `shorts and t-shirt image' of some startup electronic firms in the Silicon Valley and he wanted to maintain an image. To that end, the fund would pay a one thousand dollar-per-year business clothing allowance to each employee at hiring.
Fund information, other than that made public by SEC filings, was to be kept in the office. Period. A contract with every employee with strong incentives to encourage loyalty and und amnesia after leaving the fund was clear on those points.
The lunch every day was free and not to be eaten at the desk. The fund owned a gym on the same floor and attendance and consultation with a personal trainer was expected every workday for thirty minutes. Sauna and showers and linens were included as well as lockers.
From the beginning, Marcus chose to hedge the investments of the fund in different sectors of the economy, purchasing dozens of stocks from well-managed firms with a history of steady growth and dividends.
It was his contention that although the costs of trading were less because they owned their own trading staff and as a result paid commissions to themselves essentially, the main driving factor for growth of the fund would be the growth of the economy and dividends, neither of which factors would be influenced much on the upside by frantic buying and selling on a daily basis.
He decided to add opportunities to the fund's portfolio with deliberate analytic speed and avoid the flash of the "next thing."
The day that the first wire for five hundred million dollars came in, for Marcus, was uneventful. The Chase Bank account executive assigned to the fund had expected the wire for several days, having been alerted by the trust.
It was the largest wire transfer Chase had handled for a private charitable fund in recent memory. The wire room at the bank called the account executive and sent him a copy of the transfer.
He forwarded that to the Controller at the Blossom fund, stating the funds were immediately available. The bank had at least one trust account and valued that account dearly and wanted to be accommodating.
A copy of that email to the controller immediately flashed onto Marcus' desktop computer. The Dell added to that thread a memo from the trust that indicated that a second identical wire would arrive in six weeks.
Marcus had long since decided exactly what stocks and bonds he would purchase and at what price he would buy them. He had purchased several software models for the purpose with intent to compare the results they obtained.
In addition, he hired a group of software engineers and told them they had exactly one week to earn a fortune. They had worked in shifts to write proprietary software modeling for the Dell Pearcey-like clusters available to him. Most of the modeling software available had not been optimized for that hardware.
His team members had participated in writing supercomputer software for large university research projects and once given parameters, could crank out code rapidly.
He had instructed his supercomputer running trillions of calculations each second to calculate several models of an ideal list of equities to buy first and at what optimal price those equities should be purchased for the best potential growth and income. Marcus looked at the differences in the models, noted how similar the models were and took the average of three that had cranked out the closest results.
It had taken a very small part of one day for the cluster to calculate the models for the optimal initial batch of purchases in every economic sector. Some of the purchases could have been guessed perhaps. IBM, Pfizer, Conoco-Phillips, BNSF, Microsoft, Apple and others were familiar. Many more stock ticker symbols represented companies unfamiliar to many but paid the highest dividends over time.
Messages were sent to Marcus if unexpected serious market changes occurred. Information about individual stocks and bonds came to the broker responsible for that stock or stock group directly into the brokers' desk computers.
Those desktop computers were wired into the Dell and together with the assigned broker, assessed the company's reports, tasked the broker-analyst communication schedules and prioritized messages to Marcus, depending on a complex formula which included stock goals and performance, market volume and volatility for that stock and technical information for each stock for different time periods.
The Dell added tasks to the individual broker's task lists. These tasks would sometimes be messages from Marcus `suggesting' new surveillance of a stock, for instance. The task list was just that, a list. The brokers accessed their own task list on their computer screen. Each task was checked off as completed by the broker, at which time the task disappeared from the screen, but was stored for all time in the supercomputer database along with date and time completed.
Typical tasks contained reminders to forward reports, to call the CEO, CFO or controller of a company for information, to review SEC filings, to forward SEC filings to the Dell for further analysis and checking for consistency with previous filings.
Tasks appeared on each broker's list from Marcus, from supervisors and sometimes by the Dell itself as it found discrepancies in data or needed information.
Broker supervisors, who checked the brokers' task lists, assigned new brokers to new stocks and monitored their performance for human resource evaluations represented each sector of the economy: pharmaceuticals, agriculture, mining, retail, banking, entertainment, information technology, manufacturing, healthcare, information services and more.
Marcus had decided that the goals of the Fund demanded liquidity, so the Fund purchased very limited amounts of precious metals. He objected to options and futures as excessive risk. Junk bonds were out. Puts and calls were used sparingly. Mortgage securities and bundled packages and indexes and REIT's were passed over initially. The initial purchase list was transmitted to their floor trader and some purchases went to the market maker firm owned by the Schuyler trust.
At the end of the day, seventy per cent of those purchases had been made. The remaining thirty per cent would await better pricing from willing sellers. Marcus realized the possible effects on the market of buying huge chunks at a time and wasn't in such a hurry that he would risk losing the lower acquisition costs.
He picked up the phone and told his planners that the second check would arrive in six weeks and to have the Dell calculate a full portfolio summary for the whole billion-dollar fund to include the task summary and order list for the second initial equity purchases.
The Dell already had begun to track the portfolio to date with expenses and income divided by source, whether dividend or market appreciation. This tracking occurred each minute with hourly summaries.
The market noticed the purchases. The Dow didn't flicker. He took a limousine home to the Museum that night and plunged into the Museum pool to clear his head. His mom handed him a towel as he climbed out after several dozen laps and asked about his day.
After supper, Michael and Marcus watched the news, talked for a while about life and art and people and both thought how good life was and how they had planned things pretty much. That was it, really. Planning was the key to happiness. Just planning would do it. They had the world as their oyster.
They thought that until both brought up the idea of children. Each on the same day in the same conversation, on their own, thought they were bringing up a new idea to the other. They both had marshaled arguments for and against adoption and surrogate mothers. The oyster concept soon faded.
Michael had talked to Carol about kids soon afterward.
"Mom," he said, "I think that Marcus and I would make great fathers."
Long pause. Hearing no answer, he cautiously continued.
"I'm pretty sure that neither one of us can have children in the biologic sense."
A muffled snort emanated from the direction of his mother, whose face was serene and trying very hard to be serious. A crack or two in the façade was beginning to show.
Her eyes were laughing, but she kept a serious face on for the moment and replied,
"What can I do to be helpful, Michael?"
The reply itself wasn't. Particularly helpful, that is. He was trying to broach what could be a sensitive subject and needed to know her response.
"As you know, mom, there was a time when I thought I had to make my own life because everything I knew got taken away and you had nothing to do with that, but now you are back. I hope, I want you to approve the decisions that I make."
Carol looked at him, "I have known that you would make a world-class father along with Marcus for a long time. I wondered how long it would take for you to realize that."
"You and Barbara did not have a wonderful dad, but he did love you in his own way, I think. So, what's the plan, Sam?"
I told mom that we had talked about adoption of a baby and adoption of a child and adoption of a teenager and getting a mother through surrogacy from one of us. Neither of us knew how that would turn out, of course, but we both were shy of the possible risk of not getting a baby if the surrogate mother decided she wanted to keep the baby. We knew the risk was low but knew what a billion dollars here or there might do to influence her family or an attorney to put the pressure on a surrogate mom to do what she might have not considered before.
"We decided we could adopt a child with a good background who lost their parents to something."
That didn't come out right since it matched my own history precisely and was probably pathologic or something. On the other hand, I couldn't have put my fingers on anything like what was actually in my head.
Somewhere out there were kids who had been through or were going through the same thing I had. I could have used a parent then, or could I? What if things turned out well, because I didn't have that help, that crutch?
Mom and I sat in silence, thinking. She was in a listening mode.
"Marcus and I talked about adopting a baby, but neither of us have the time to do the twenty-four-hour diaper and feeding thing but would think we needed to and wouldn't want a nanny to do it for us or a relative either, not that you couldn't or wouldn't." Mom just listened.
"We thought about asking the mother to come with the baby and raise it but can see all kinds of potential trouble with that one. In the end, we thought a younger child, perhaps one or two years old, hopefully healthy, who had lost parents from illness or addiction or accident. But then we thought about children with health issues. Kids with deformities, learning-disabled children, handicaps of other kinds, chronic illness."
Didn't they need homes too?
"We have enough money to build a hospital like St. Jude's only here in Manhattan. But there's already a ton of well-funded children's hospitals competing for patients on this island."
"What about a children's hospital in another place? Like Zimbabwe or something. Bulawayo needs one."
We were drifting off topic, but I liked this topic too. In fact, mom had been talking about a birthday party next year there. What if the trust could fund a staffed, well-funded, well-supplied children's hospital, modern, the latest of everything, perhaps a nursing school...my mind started to wander a little.
"I'll talk to somebody about that tomorrow, mom. Meanwhile, back on topic, Marcus and I are going to start looking for a two or three-year-old child, perhaps two of them, perhaps related, perhaps not. Keep your eyes peeled."
I told mom she might be able to nominate, at least, her next two grandchildren and now her eyes weren't twinkling exactly, they were reflecting the light better because of tears in her eyes. Good tears.
Marcus and I had another talk that night. Over a hot cup of wild sweet orange herbal tea, he told me that he had conferred with Blossom and gotten the same general response.
We were prepared to launch an adoption agency blitz on New York using a classic alpha-male football offense move.
We should have known that life doesn't always work that way and sometimes when the situation is most important and the decisions the most critical, things sneak in under the radar.
The two little jets that snuck under the radar lay sleeping on the front sidewalk at 'Mr. Lee' corner market which sat a block away from ours to the west. We walked there with our security staff one night for exercise, but mostly for the peppermint ice cream from a farm in upstate New York that this Korean guy carried in stock.
That ice cream put his store on the map. He had the exclusive rights to their entire output for New York City; fans from all over the island came when they could to snatch it up; in cones, cups, pints and both one and five-gallon tubs.
The two little kids, about two years old, maybe five years old, I thought, looked peaceful enough at the moment. The officers surrounding them on the sidewalk not so much. The kids looked sweet all cuddled together with a thin, worn blanket with a torn edge. The officers were scratching their heads and shuffling their feet and looking around as if for rescue. Born out of craziness and hubris, I asked one officer what was up, and he replied that these kids would be `the death of us yet'.
"What are they doing on the sidewalk?"
"Sleeping."
"Why aren't they sleeping in a bed?"
"They're homeless, or rather, their mom is darn close. She doesn't work. She can't make it to work because she has to take care of the kids and the landlord turns off the heat and she lays inebriated most of the time in the apartment and the kids play around the neighborhood unsupervised. They've been in foster care. Nobody takes them for long."
They look cute enough. Why won't they take them?"
"They have more energy per square inch than Satan, that's why."
"Oh."
I asked an aide beside me to get every scrap of information he could about these two kids and I wanted every piece of paper on my desk tomorrow at the Schuyler Museum. I told the cop the same thing and he rolled his eyes.
"I don't know you from Adam and I think you're clueless. Why don't you just get what ya came for and go back home."
"Because," and I looked at Marcus for a minute and waited for a nod which came after about one second, "they are for whom we came."