Free Madeline Carter - 01 - Mad Money by Linda L. Richards Page A

standard.
    Langton’s financials weren’t bad, but they
weren’t especially great either. LRG had a lot of employees, a lot
of overhead and — from the looks of things — fairly complacent
management. The current CEO was seriously old and was the grandson
of the guy who had founded the company back in the 1930s. The
family was prominent — what passes for old money in Southern
California — and they lived pretty well. The fact that the company
couldn’t always support their familial excesses didn’t seem to
really matter to anyone besides, of course, the stockholders and an
increasing number of grumpy analysts. And when enough stock
analysts get sufficiently grumpy, things start to change.
    From what Ernie had told me, the change
they’d decided on was him. And, as he’d implied, it was a change
that could make all of the difference for this particular stock.
He’d said they were set to make an announcement Monday: my first
independent trading day.
    Over the weekend I wrestled with the insider
trading thing, but — to be perfectly honest — not too mightily.
Let’s face it: it was a day trader’s wet dream. A teensy bit of
unasked for information could potentially make me a lot of money.
All of my instincts said: This Is It. And, in my business, you
listen to your instincts. At least, if your instincts have, over
the years, instructed you that they’re worth listening to. Mine
always had.
    Monday dawned clear and bright. Tycho and I
pounded through the hills, but today I barely noticed the
eucalyptus and the palm trees and I ignored the ocean vistas
altogether. My mind was on other things.
    Back at my computer, I scanned the early
notices. Nothing on LRG, which meant it would probably come around
nine am Pacific Time — my time in L.A. — which made sense as that’s
when, since they were based in the city, their office would be
open.
    Regardless of when the office opened, the
stock was already trading. I checked it the way a moth checks a
flame. As I’d expected, even prior to the announcement, it was
starting to happen. Most of the time, just prior to the breaking of
some significant piece of news, a narrow column of insiders will
hop on board causing the stock to give a little jump before
anything really happens. I realized with a start that I was now
lining up to be part of that crowd.
    And so I moved. While LRG hovered between
$5.88 and $6.00, I put in a buy order for 20,000 shares. To a lot
of people, $120,000 is hardly worth getting out of bed for but, at
this stage, it was a big chunk of my liquid wad. I tried to ignore
the sweat on my palms.
    I kept my eyes on my newsfeed and when an
hour after my buy on LRG an announcement was made, I read the whole
thing:
    LANGTON REGIONAL GROUP ANNOUNCES THE
APPOINTMENT OF NEW CEO
    It was the usual company PR material — lots
of forward face and future optimism — but it was the announcement
that, essentially, Ernie had told me to expect. Between refreshing
my screen to watch how the announcement would hit the market, I
read the news release. Basically, LRG said that their old CEO,
William Gunnarson III, had opted for an early retirement (yeah,
right!) and that the company was — blah, blah, blah — pleased to
announce his replacement, one Ernest Carmichael Billings late of
NeanderTek.
    It tickled me that two-timing,
double-dealing Ernie should have been the one to give me this tip.
I had no doubt he’d be able to turn the company around. Ernie was
tough as a garden slug and he had this incredible killer instinct,
even back in college. Sometimes being with Ernie then had been like
sharing a nest with a baby vulture. Baby vultures are cute in a
kind of repulsive way and, essentially, they are helpless but, at
some base level, they understand what they’ve been put on this
earth to do. Back then Ernie was like that. A baby vulture waiting
for his big break. It was not so easy to be around.
    And, on a certain level, the vulture analogy
isn’t even a very