Make Me Even

Book excerpt: For one 1970s teenager, winning at poker and winning on Wall Street go hand-in-hand: “A coming-of-age story for the ages.” —Peter Lattman, vice chairman, The Atlantic In the wake of his mother’s death, Rogers Stout has no choice but to grow up fast. By high school, he already has the gambler’s gifts: a titanic brain, an uncanny ability to read people, and a risk-taker’s daring. All he lacks is direction . . . Everything changes the summer before his senior year when Rogers is invited into the boisterous environment of an investment bank’s trading room—and to a gambling hall dive where he immediately wins big at poker, capturing the attention of his coworkers with his card-playing skills. Intrigued by trading markets, Rogers’s intellectual curiosity takes him to Wharton and then Wall Street, where he faces challenges as an outsider who thinks and acts differently from the white-shoe establishment. Riding professional and personal highs and lows—like the stock market crash of 1974—he’ll have to learn to rebound, if he’s to survive . . . An intriguing look at human aspiration and the interplay of honor, greed, fear, and individuality, this novel reveals a time when a new generation upended the status quo on Wall Street and forever changed investing. “A rip-roaring yarn of baseball, poker, and Wall Street told with humor and humanity, and a loving rendering of Wharton in the seventies.” —Geoffrey Garrett, dean, The Wharton School “[An] absorbing story of an aspiring Wall Street trader.” —Kirkus Reviews