From Publishers Weekly Former energy trader McMeel offers a frightening look inside the world of energy trading in his high-octane debut about a swarm of traders, brokers, and execs all looking for the big score. The main players are promising young trader Gallagher and his boss, Andrews, who assesses that Gallagher is sharp, has great instincts, and just might pass muster at Allied Power, but he worries that the young man's first loss will bring him crashing down. Early on, Andrews learns that his nemesis, "the Ghost," will be taking over as head trader and that he must fight desperately for his survival. Indeed, there are vendettas, plots, and schemes behind every Bloomberg terminal and enough liquor and cholesterol consumed to turn your blood into pudding. McMeel gets into the nitty-gritty of the energy trade racket (there's a glossary and a brief guide explaining how the whole sordid business works), but keeps the pace quick and the writing tight, though more care could have been taken in fleshing out the main characters, who could use more defining traits than sheer greed. (Dec.) (c) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. Read more From Booklist In simplistic trading terms, being short is selling something that you don’t own yet. Though it is often hard for layperson to wrap their heads around this common trading practice, it is a scenario that is all too familiar to seasoned traders. McMeel, a former commodities broker, struts his stuff in this insider’s homage to the high-stakes, roller-coaster world of energy trading. The cast of ballsy, adrenaline-infused characters—those who live and die by the next trade—he introduces will ring true to anyone acquainted with the volatile futures industry. Novices will thrill to the highs and lows of the ride as a successful young trader gets caught in a web of greed orchestrated by a slimy pro that just might bring him down—or will it? For those who might get bogged down in the trading lingo, McMeel has appended a handy glossary of trader’s terms. --Margaret Flanagan Read more Review “Noir has been called an indigenous American art form, and Cortright McMeel uses its cold, black style to give his entertaining debut novel, Short, a swift, kicky drive…  As a work in the Tom Wolfe-David Mamet school of finance, this is entertaining and feels just right.  With his dark, wry portraits of the men behind the market, McMeel seems to be diagnosing all that’s gone wrong with 21st-century Wall Street: its complex derivatives, its unseemly bonuses, its billionaire hedge-fund managers… Short is lithe and funny.” -- Jess Walter, The Washington Post “The result is fueled by resonant high-octane prose that glues the reader to the pages; the temptation is to immediately go back and reread this singularly rich and satisfying work.” -- Denver Post Read more About the Author CORTRIGHT MCMEEL is a veteran energy trader, short story writer, and is the co-founder of the literary journal Murdaland, where he has published Mary Gaitskill, Jayne Ann Phillips, Tom Franklin, and Richard Bausch, among others. Read more Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. SHORT by Cortright McMeelChapter 1Trading Floor A haiku of fat.Hutchinson: Three-egg omelet. Double sausage and potato. Order onion rings.            The breakfast list went out.Miller: Double egg over easy, bacon and tomato on Asiago bagel.            Churchill: Bacon, ham, egg and cheese on English muffin.            Large: Three pancakes, butter & cream cheese. Side order bacon.            Greenblatt:  Two-egg omelet. Chorizo and cheese. Hash browns with apple sauce.The list traveled around the energy desk. A formica grey tablet of Biblical proportion, the desk was forty-five feet long. It housed six traders* per side, twelve in all. The senior traders at Allied Power were veterans of the commodities circuit. Most of them had made their bones in big utilities or on the Mercantile Exchange in New York.  Of the younger traders, two showed promise. One was a mathematics prodigy who had come up fresh from Cal Tech. The other was a kid named Gallagher from a Minnesota utility. The list complete, Andrews, the boss, passed it to Sami.The traders looked up at the mounted flat screen TV with shifty eyes and quiet interest.  A wild bull was running amok in Kansas City. A train transporting cattle had overturned and one maverick had escaped unharmed, charging off into the urban landscape. The havoc wreaked thus far included a few broken rear-view mirrors, the dented hood of a Cadillac, three resultant fender benders and a five mile backup to the city bound lanes of Route 70. A live broadcast from CNN showed the scene, an indignant brown bull taunting commuters, as he lowered his head and wagged his short stumps of horns at them.             The traders snorted with contempt. The story said it all. The bull market had gone crazy and now apparently it had no fear for the bull was off in Kansas City, trampling on the hood of some hayseed’s car. Andrews didn’t laugh, though. He was hungry and thinking of yesterday’s botched order.            -Sami, make sure I get double cream cheese this time, demanded Andrews.            It was midmorning on Allied Power’s trading floor in Boston. 8:30am. Brokers were already shouting down numbers on squawk boxes even though the New York Mercantile Exchange wouldn’t open for another hour and a half.            Gallagher, whose broad forehead and round, cherubic face made him resemble an overgrown toddler, sat at his desk, sipping at carton of chocolate milk. Andrews looked at his newest acquisition and furrowed his brow. Traders drank coffee, black.            Overnight Natural Gas futures had shot up forty cents. Gallagher allowed himself a tight grin. Miller, the trader who sat across from him, said:            -You got your poker face on, Joe.            Gallagher said nothing. His smile was the smile of a simpleton.             Large, who was Gallagher’s neighbor to his left, said:            -He’s long as balls.            Andrews stood up and glared across the desk at his young protege. As broad as Gallagher was, Andrew’s powerful girth encompassed two of him. Andrews could have easily made the minimum weight requirement to wrestle sumo in Tokyo. Breakfast was on his mind, but when big money was being made it had a sweet smell of its own, one that even trumped food.            -How long are you Joe?             -Long, he said.            -Shut it down before you give it all back.             -Natty’s going to the moon, said Gallagher. –I’ll sell when it gets to $9.            -Wrong answer, said Andrews.            Since Gallagher had signed on, he’d had an impressive run and Andrews decided to take the young trader under his wing. He had only one doubt about the newcomer: how he’d take his first loss. In Andrew’s mind trading was about two things, taking profits and enduring pain. Gallagher had not yet shown he could take the pain. Gallagher nodded at Andrews, signaling that he would exit the position. Then he sipped at his chocolate milk.             Andrews was at his core a family man. Taciturn, moral, occasionally sentimental after twelve beers, his desk was covered with beach and ski vacation photos of his three children and his wife, a striking brunette. An industrious Midwesterner, he was the first to arrive on the desk, last to leave. And while dedicated to his vocation, Andrew’s passion laid with his religious beliefs: Chicago Bears football. His place of worship was his den, every Sunday sitting on the couch in front of his TV, baptizing his thirst with a new cold beer every commercial break. As for actual religion, Andrews believed that was a niche market reserved for women and children. When his Iowa born Lutheran wife worried for his immortal soul, Andrews would respond that his status as a taxpayer absolved him from sin and any of the other apparent character flaws he might happen to possess.            Andrews and the other traders knew very little about Joe Gallagher save that he recently came up from their version of the minors. He seldom drank with them when he first started, and after one night when Gallagher had drank too much, he drank with them not at all. Andrews had certain insights into the nature of his understudy that the others lacked. He was walking by Gallagher’s desk one day and saw a small piece of paper taped to his desktop. On it read cryptic words, words that no trader should tape to any desk: Both the victor and the vanquishedAre but drops of dew,But bolts of lightning:Thus should we view the world.            Many of the other traders left Gallagher to himself. Being a superstitious lot, they suspected from his brooding nature that the residue of a recent misfortune clung to him like bad mojo. Andrews alone reached out to him.             -I don’t know if you saw the memo, said Andrews. –We drink coffee here, not milk.        Gallagher nodded, remaining silent. Andrews patted down his cowlick of thick blonde hair above his brow with the palm of his hand. It was a habit he had when perturbed.After this the men got back to business, the business of taking other people’s money. Hurricanes, weather, gas draws, nuke plants coming online, nukes coming offline, coal barges and rail transport disruptions, transmission lines that caused price congestion between the hubs, and then again with the weather. On top of all that, one had to throw crude oil insanity in the mix, the terrorists and psychopathic nuke-wielding leaders with a taste for shoving lit firecrackers in the ass of geopolitics. Predicting gas, oil and electricity futures was an easy job when you happened to be right. It was also easy when you were wrong: You got fired.Gallagher finished his chocolate milk and pulled up the commodity news service CQG, which also provided natural gas and crude oil trend charts. There was a record amount of gas in the ground. The economy was sagging because the Republicans were fighting wars that no one believed in. Record supply, waning demand. It was there, while sitting at his desk that Gallagher felt his third eye coming on. It was a thing he told no one about, looking at the nat gas bar chart, he sometimes heard a music from the upticks and down ticks, which arranged themselves like notes on a score. Gallagher gazed about the room and felt a truth that no one yet realized. The market was going to rally, a chocolate milk epiphany.Still, he had to convince himself. The art of trading lay in good judgment and constant adjustment. He looked at the candlestick charts: the monthly, weekly and daily charts all lined up with bullish hammer patterns. As the price of gas ticked higher on the Intercontinental Exchange, an electronic trading platform known as “ICE,” Joe had the feeling he imagined a general might have before a decisive victory. Tomorrow and the next day were irrelevant. The battle was now. Others were bleeding on the battlefield. His heavy cavalry and tank divisions rolled over them, massacring legions, driving them into the dirt.Taste it, as his broker would say.Take them to the woodshed.Blood on the walls.As gas rallied, his adversaries who had sold to him at much lower levels suffered as electronic dollars, their lifeblood, went pouring into Gallagher’s trading book. He tried to wear his invincibility with an air of grim silence like he’d seen Andrews do. Andrews, always adept with football analogies, had a li... Read more
L**N
Don't "short" yourself--read McMeel's novel SHORT
We've seen financial thrillers before--such bestselling novels such as Joseph Finder and James Grippando have provided, as well as accounts of insider Wall Street reporting as Michael Lewis' (The Big Short) and Harry Markopolos' expose of Bernie Madoff in his seminal No One Would Listen come to mind--but Cortright McMeel's first novel, Short, pioneers new territory. Not a thriller in the vein of Finder or a expose such as Markopolos delivers, but rather, Short delivers us a character-driven existential work that goes much deeper than a simple detective yarn or a fact-laden historical work. In Short, we see deeply into the minds and motivations of the characters and all the permutations of greed the human animal is capable of. The characters who people this novel are not only creating a scheme to short electrical power and make obscene fortunes; they are shorting their own spirituality. And... they all lose.McMeel has created a cautionary tale of greed gone amok, of acts of terrorism as heinous as from any militant jihad, only for fortunes and not souls. A landscape of lust and gluttony, Bibical in its scope. Of the horror of modern society and the moral landscape that has shifted to naked materialism sans any semblance of moral character.Trader Joe Gallagher becomes enmeshed in a scheme to short electrical power by his boss The Ghost whose machinations include an act of terrorism as heinous as any jihad, and almost succeeds until a tropical storm turns the wrong way and becomes Hurricane Katrina, wiping out all the players in its path. Gallagher has his own agenda and ends up making money, but still comes up short on the ledger of life as he's fired and loses his wife Celina along the way.In fact, everyone loses and readers expecting to find a formulaic ending in which characters are changed as a result will discover a much more noir-like finale and one which more accurately reveals the place we find ourselves in the reality of today's society.The reader will be rewarded with more than a powerful story. McMeel delivers a original voice that is sure to draw comparisons to some of our best stylists. At turns, the prose becomes lyrical and poetic, as in this passage...Celina felt comfortable among her old friends. The feeling of being in a nexus of the art world among artists made Celina feel as if she had woken up from a deep sleep. Her eyes and ears cannibalized the room, taking in the various energies, the steely hope of the up and comers, the sucking sound made by the failures and the struggling, the tittering of industry minions and the smug, leering eyes of the wealthy buyers, professionals, middle aged men in pressed pants. She was normally so far away from this and the room began to pulse like a heart beat. Celina was aware of the hunger sweeping over her like it does those recovering from a sickness; the appetite, so long suppressed, returns ravenous tenfold, almost to the point of passion....to profound insights...There is a difference between boxers and warriors. The old veteran's of the trading floor fought for more than money, more than the game, it was a strange war to them, one that would never end until the trader's on the other end were destroyed and they were victorious. Theirs was a taste of something that they themselves could not define. The only glimpse of it could be seen when they were up a crapload of money and they had a look on their face that was not of happiness, nor giddiness with riches, but one of relief. That moment which would make any normal man ecstatic, merely served as brief respite for them before they embarked on their next campaign, the result of which would have them losing what they had won or making more. Gallagher wondered if the way trading was for them, a life or death affair, was more of a blessing or a curse....and the heart of the matter...As Stan spoke and praised the Lord and his life and his wife and his luck and his house and his pool and his job and his country and his faith, Milt bore inside his own belly an evil, yellow-fanged, greedy, ugly, growling demon, even more hungry and obscene than usual. Milt felt he saw Stan's preaching for what it was, a selfish need to exorcise guilt by saving others.In the end, none of the players escape the insanity. Which is the brilliance of this novel. The author knows the truth of the matter--that learning one is mad doesn't constitute a cure. This is Camus' The Stranger written by a spiritual descendant of Kafka and decidedly worth your time.Les EdgertonAuthor: Hooked, The Death of Tarpons, Finding Your Voice, Monday's Meal and others.
S**H
Entertaining, realistic story
I worked at an energy trading firm and can say, based on my own experiences, this book captures the essence of that world. The author captures the essence of the trading world by creating characters who are memorable, realistic and unique. In many vocations, especially in corporate America, unique and memorable characters would instantly mark the story as unrealistic, but the world of trading is marked by idiosyncratic individuals, bombasts, blowhards, the superstitious and assorted various other characters. The author picks his subject matter well and it is obvious it is a world he is intimately familiar with.The story is realistic and the plot kept me enthralled. I'd recommend this book for anyone who is curious as to what traders do and how they do it but wants to be entertained by a first-rate story.
P**D
Finally a story worth reading
I am the classic occasional reader, enjoying most books while on business trips. Short is the first book that I have read in years that doesn't suffer from the far fetched unreachable aspirations of 99% of the books on the best seller lists. Don't look here for a world ending scenario saved by a Bond like character that has more lives than Fritz the cat. This book screams real. As I read I kept looking around me at the guys in the airport lounge, wondering if they were part of this drama. The jacket cover says Wall Street meets the office. I am more inclined to believe that I am in the midst of a reality TV show with a fast paced story line and characters that are so interesting I would like to meet them over a few beers.McMeel can describe a room so well you can smell the leather on the couch and yet the prose is so intriguing you are not lost in the details. MeMeel doesn't oversimplify, rather he brings the reader up to his level. Buy this book if you want a good look into the lives of truly interesting people as a story unfolds around them that will keep you up at night turning pages.
E**A
So fast paced you forget its a work of genuine literature
This first novel by Cort McMeel is characterized as much by its literary brilliance--the book begins with an expertly rendered haiku about the high fat diets of energy traders--as it is by its insights into the ethos and strategies of the energy trading floor. While this book can easily serve as a primer for those entering the energy trading field, it can also serve as a reminder of just how ugly our species can become when heat waves that kill thousands are cause for high-fives among those who can stand to make millions from a spike in energy prices. The genius of McMeel's book is that it deftly juggles all of these issues without apologizing for or celebrating the poor behavior of its characters. It is a work of deep human insight, and I trust it will have a long shelf life.
B**H
Best American Financial Market Novel Ever
Cort does amazing work here. He steps beyond the fascinating insights you find in one of Michael Lewis's superb works on financial services skullduggery (Liar's Poker, The Big Short, Flash Boys), and adds the qualities of literary excellence, poetry, and the emotional depths great novels are best at reaching. It's as if Hemingway came back to write about twenty-first century financial market manipulating madness and the existential meaning within.
R**N
Great book. Can't stop once started.
McMeel did a very good job with this book. Not only it does live up as a financial thriller, it gives insightful background to the life of brokers, traders and various other interconnected personnel in the realm of trading floor. The everyday life of each characters and the outcome of their decisions throughout the book was exciting and love the ending so much.I'm not sure how true is the world and background portrayed by McMeel in SHORT, but the flow and writing does give me the chills that this is realistic.
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