大象传媒

From writer Abdul-Rehman Malik:

For the son of an accountant, I basically turned out to be a financial dunce. My father聽鈥� and mother for that matter 鈥� can turn sums in their heads, dispense complicated聽multiplications with a wave of their fingers and divide anything by anything. I, on the聽other hand, look at a string of numbers and have to steady myself.

Yet, growing up, I harboured a secret desire to be a tycoon. 聽It all began for me at the public gallery of the Toronto Stock Exchange. 聽Nowadays, the process is entirely virtual, but this was the 1980s and the brokers in聽their funny coloured blazers would dance around each, shaking their fists in the air聽and holding little chits of paper ready to buy long or sell short (or something like聽that). There was mesmerising drama in this kind of commerce as billions passing聽hands before my eyes.

At school my friends and I started a 鈥渟tock market club鈥�, kind of like fantasy football聽for budding billionaires. We鈥檇 start off with the same amount of imaginary money聽and then log our investments with the winner earning bragging rights at the end of the month.

I wish we were suave and cool like the Bobby Axelrod, Damian鈥檚 deliciously聽addictive character from Billions, but we were more like 5 th grade downmarket聽Gordon Geckos. Misfits scanning the business section of the newspaper for stock聽listings at lunch hour, checking out a hot tip on that penny stock that might make us聽鈥� fictitiously 鈥� rich.

鈥淚f you want money more than anything,鈥� the mystic Rumi counselled, 鈥測ou will be聽bought and sold. If you have a greed for food, you will become a loaf of bread. This is聽a subtle truth. Whatever you love, you are.鈥�

In the years since my Wall Street reveries, I鈥檝e had the honour of meeting聽remarkable men and women, who know their way around a hedge fund, but know even better how to use their wealth to transform lives. Perhaps, if I鈥檇 had their vision from the start, I would have done better. As for my fear of numbers, I married a woman who manages the balance book with skill. Too bad, she鈥檚 still got to manage me.