The Midnight Dance — Behind the Scenes: Chapters 15 & 16
Chapter 15
In this chapter, Elam cooks for Charles and we learn a little more about Charles’s business (Hedgemoney) and Elam starts to open up about his past.
This scene had to happen on a Tuesday so that Charles would find Brian on shift the next day, so unfortunately our boys had to yearn for a couple of days after their Hamilton not-date.
Twins
In the phone conversation at the start of this chapter, Charles and Elam banter about twins for the first time. This was another way to introduce some duality into the plot so I was quite happy with it, except I did feel bad for Charles when Elam accidentally implied that Zane was evil.
“One twin is a dirty liar and the other is sweet and innocent. That’s how twins work, don’t you know? There’s always an evil twin.”
I personally like it when there are easter eggs like this in a book that the reader might only pick up or appreciate the second time they read.
Lactose
When Elam offers to cook Charles a sauce that contains milk, he’s willing to put up with the effects of his food allergy to not be a burden to Elam, the way he’s done often around his family. I also wanted to make it clear that Charles had a good reason for being upset about the milk in his coffee when we first met him, even if he totally over reacted.
Hedgemoney
I wanted Charles’s business to show two things: that he’s incredibly smart and that he’s actually a good guy.
Hedgemoney was always going to be a business that I understood more about than I put on the page because, in general, financial stuff is not exactly fascinating unless you’re a specific type of person, like Charles. However, I wanted to make it make sense in case you (or any other reader) does happen to be a Charles type of person. So here’s the low down.
“Well, my research showed that companies that care about social issues are actually likely to perform better in the long term.”
This is the research Charles is referring to.
In addition to his business being socially conscious, it also needed to have a value proposition good enough to explain why he got VC funding great enough to have his penthouse and fancy car (not to mention the Forbes article) at such a young age.
Having an algorithm isn’t that much of a game changer as algorithm-based investing is already a thing (see: robo-advisor). The argument against these is that real life can’t really be explained by numbers and that human investors need a human who can account for natural biases and coach them through times of uncertainty or stress.
What makes Charles’s algorithm different is that it doesn’t just look for winning stocks but can react instantaneously to news (like, for example, Jeff Bezos buying a yacht while underpaying his employees), and suggest taking investment away from those companies. This is a completely fictional piece of tech that wouldn’t work in real life because have you met an AI bot? They’re still really stupid. They wouldn’t know propaganda from real news and they’d be too open to manipulation. But in the story, Charles came up with a way around all of that and that’s what got him his funding. He’s not just a finance guy but also a very smart coder.
Hedgemoney then has human fund managers who use the algorithm to assist with stock picking into responsible companies, but they deal with clients face-to-face. Which is why he was courting the Arrigos in that first chapter and how he ended up on the phone to an interior designer.
Missy’s idea later to add the algorithm to an app to enable people to manage their own funds is actually what ends up setting Hedgemoney apart. It means creating a tier that’s not “actively managed” but does use a robo-advisor, which still takes advantage of the AI he’s developed, which they can offer much cheaper to appeal to a younger cliental and also would enable them to take on more clients because they wouldn’t need a large staff to cater to them. Then, once users progressed in their careers and started earning higher salaries, they could graduate to a tier where they had a human adviser. The fact that both services were part of the same company would also make it easy for the user to transition while maintaining their current portfolios.
Apps for trading exist already (albeit without the social responsibility angle). The most well known is probably Robinhood.
Even though Hedgemoney is more focused on long-term growth and investing, watching Robinhood’s performance over the past few years can still give us an indication of how Hedgemoney did during the recent global turmoil and the answer is: pretty great. During the second half of 2020, Robinhood saw a higher increase in trading volumes than any other major brokerage. In Jan 2021, it became a global household name during the Gamestop short squeeze. This publicity ended up being negative for Robinhood, but would have been positive for Charles when people who were addicted to trading started looking for more sustainable (in more ways than one) solutions.
(Don’t) pity the child
When it comes to Elam’s duality, he’s incredibly uncomfortable being the soft and uncertain Elam in front of Charles. He likes it when he can be confident, self-assured and sassy. It represents the person he wants to be, an identity he feels he’s earned.
So this is why he gets so upset when Charles pities him, not only in this scene but later as well (with the soup incident).
Our Cinderella in this book is a bit more of a psychological one. He was Cinderella at the ball, now it’s pumpkin hour and all of his fancy clothes and jewels have been ripped away, revealing a poor little orphan who’s hard done by and vulnerable. He wants Charles to admire him and see him as his equal, not pity him. And Charles says the exact right thing. Perhaps the only right thing in that situation:
“To go through all that and to still chase after your dreams and actually achieve them, and to have such confidence in who you are and what you want from life? That’s pretty darn impressive.”
He’s saying: you’re still the man at the ball, the one I wanted to dance all night with. The fact that you came from hardship makes you even more impressive.
Assured that he still has Charles’s respect, Elam feels compelled to test that: Would he still feel that way if he knew about the Black Swan things I’ve done? So, he starts confessing about the double life, but instead taps into a much deeper confession: Just how cruel his brothers were to him.
Charles now understands exactly what Elam meant when he said “I grew up with someone who spoke to me like you did yesterday and I’m over that, okay? I won’t be treated like that anymore.” and it breaks his heart to be compared with that sort of cruelty. He is deeply ashamed. In addition to the direct shame for how he treated Elam, this has a knock-on effect as he realizes the deeper impact that his temper has on those around him. Which is why the next time we see him it’s at the Spindle to apologize.
Chapter 16
“Goth Sloth is up front, rather than Arrigo Junior, and everyone seems to want to talk to him.”
This scene is set during Brian’s first shift after his little gun shot incident. I wanted readers to put together the pieces while Charles, of course, is oblivious.
“Elam! Yeah. Blond with eyes like Cobain? Into theater?”
It actually took me a while to think of what Brian’s frame of reference would be for someone who looked like Elam. Even though he only mentioned the eyes, the overall impression needed to be similar. In The Christmas Wishes we discover that Brian had a punk phase, so Nirvana made sense. The analogy is also flattering so it sets Charles even more on edge about the two of them.