Étienne Moreau answered on the first ring.
That alone told me everything about his current mood. Étienne only answered on the first ring when he was bored enough to be dangerous — which usually meant he was either about to do something stupid on his own, or desperately needed someone else to be responsible for whatever happened next.
"You're alive," he said, by way of greeting.
"I told you I was."
"Texting me doesn't count as being alive, James. Anyone can text. I needed to hear the voice." A pause. "You sound weird."
"I had a concussion."
"Right. Yeah." Another pause — shorter, but with weight in it. "You scared us, man. Your mum called my mum. My mum cried. I had to sit with her for an hour and drink tea and pretend I wasn't freaking out too."
This was, for Étienne, the emotional equivalent of a speech. He was not a person who admitted to freaking out. He admitted to being mildly inconvenienced at most, and only when absolutely cornered.
"I'm fine," I said. "And I need a favour."
Silence.
Then: "Of course you do. You nearly die and three days later you need a favour. This is so incredibly you, James, I can't even be surprised."
"Do you still have that brokerage account?"
The silence that followed this was a different kind — not the silence of someone thinking, but the silence of someone who had just registered that the conversation was going somewhere unexpected and was deciding how to feel about it.
"The Boursorama one?" he said finally. "Yeah. Why?"
"I need to use it."
"...to do what?"
"To buy stocks."
Another silence. Longer this time.
"James." His voice had taken on the particular careful tone he used when he thought I was about to make him do something that would require explaining to his mother. "I opened that account because Guillaume bet me twenty euros I wouldn't. I have four hundred and twelve euros in it. I've never actually bought anything."
"I know. I need you to deposit more and let me manage it."
"How much more?"
"Eight thousand."
The silence after that was so complete I checked my phone to make sure the call hadn't dropped.
"Eight. Thousand. Euros." He said it like three separate sentences. "James, where are you getting eight thousand euros? You work at a library."
"Sasung's legal team."
"...they paid you eight thousand euros?"
"Compensation. For the accident."
I heard him exhale — a long, slow breath, the sound of someone recalibrating. Then, because this was Étienne and he had known me for nine years and understood, in the wordless way of very old friendship, that I did not make proposals without having already thought through every angle:
"What's your plan?"
"I've identified a position. An infrastructure company on the CAC 40. I want to take a long position — buy and hold for three to six months. Based on their recent earnings, their German contract pipeline, and the upcoming infrastructure spend legislation the EU is pushing through Brussels, I think there's a strong case for significant upside."
This was true. Every word of it was true. I had done the analysis. I had read the reports. I had built a real thesis that would hold up under scrutiny from anyone who asked.
The panel had just made me significantly more confident in that thesis.
"And you want to use my account because you can't open one until you're eighteen," Étienne said.
"Yes."
"And what do I get?"
"Fifteen percent of whatever profit we make."
I heard him sit up. The sound of a chair — his bedroom chair, the creaky one he'd had since secondary school. "Define whatever profit we make."
"If I turn eight thousand into ten thousand, you get three hundred euros. If I turn it into twelve thousand, you get six hundred."
"And if you lose it all?"
"Then we both have a bad year and you're out four hundred and twelve euros and I'm out eight thousand."
He thought about this for exactly four seconds.
"Okay," he said.
Just like that. Okay. Nine years of friendship and the unhesitating trust that came with it, wrapped up in one word.
Something tightened in my chest — not guilt, but something adjacent to it. The awareness of the gap between what I was telling him and what I was not. The weight of the thing I had decided, in that hospital room, would never leave my mouth.
"Okay," I said back.
"One condition," Étienne added. "I want weekly updates. Actual updates. Numbers, positions, everything. I'm not just handing you a login and going back to sleep — I want to understand what you're doing."
This was unexpected. And fair. And, I realised immediately, actually useful — having to explain every position in plain language would force a discipline that pure analysis sometimes lacked.
"Deal," I said.
"Okay." He was quiet for a moment. Then: "Vinci SA, right? That's the one you were reading about before the thing happened?"
I went very still.
"How do you know that?"
"Your mum told my mum what report you were carrying when the corridor blew up. She'd seen you printing it at the library." A pause. "So. Vinci SA?"
I looked at the panel. It sat at the edge of my vision, patient and empty.
"Among others," I said. "But yes. Vinci first."
The eight thousand euros arrived in Étienne's account on a Tuesday, three weeks after the accident.
I was back at school by then — cleared for return by the hospital, my arm still wrapped but no longer screaming, the headaches reduced to a dull background pressure that came and went like weather. My teachers had been informed of the accident and had responded with varying degrees of concern, ranging from genuine sympathy to a kind of administrative inconvenience about missed coursework.
I sat in the back of every class and thought about money.
Not in the distracted way of someone daydreaming. In the precise, structural way of someone building a plan load-bearing wall by load-bearing wall. I had nine months until I turned eighteen. Nine months of operating through Étienne's account, which meant nine months of working within a set of constraints: I couldn't move as fast as I wanted, couldn't act the moment I saw an opportunity, was dependent on Étienne being available and willing at each step.
Which meant I had to be right more often and wrong less. No scatter-shot testing. Every position had to be deliberate. Every use of the panel had to be cross-referenced with real analysis, because the panel gave me probability but not reasoning — and without reasoning, I had no way to know what could change the outcome.
I had written that in my notebook the night after the call with Étienne, in capital letters at the top of the page:
THE PANEL IS A COMPASS. I STILL HAVE TO READ THE MAP.
On the Wednesday after the money arrived, I called Étienne at seven in the morning.
"It's seven in the morning," he said, in the voice of someone who had just been woken up.
"The market opens at nine. I want to talk through the position before then."
A sound of sheets. Of him sitting up. Then, with the resignation of someone accepting their new reality: "Fine. Talk."
"Vinci SA. Current price, thirty-two euros and forty cents per share. I want to put four thousand into it — roughly a hundred and twenty-three shares at market open. Target exit at thirty-seven to thirty-nine euros, which is a fifteen to twenty percent gain over three to six months. Stop-loss at twenty-nine euros — if it drops below that, we sell and limit the damage."
Silence.
Then: "You figured all that out already."
"I've been figuring it out for three weeks."
"James." He paused. "Normal people spend their hospital stay watching television."
"I know."
He was quiet for a moment. "And the other four thousand?"
"We hold it. Wait for the next position. I've identified two others I'm watching — TotalEnergies and Sanofi. I'm not ready to commit yet."
"Okay." The chair again. "Walk me through why Vinci."
So I did. Forty-five minutes on the phone, Étienne asking better questions than I expected — he was sharp, when he bothered to be — and me walking him through the earnings report, the German Autobahn expansion contract, the EU infrastructure legislation that was three readings into Parliament and virtually certain to pass, the management track record, the current price relative to historical averages.
I said nothing about the panel showing 74%.
I said nothing about the panel at all.
By the time we finished, Étienne was quiet in a different way — the quiet of someone who had updated their understanding of something.
"You've been doing this for a while," he said. It wasn't quite a question.
"Reading about it. Yes."
"And you're good at it."
"I think so."
Another pause. "Okay. I'm placing the order."
I listened to him navigate the interface — the small sounds of a phone being handled, a confirmation tap, a loading screen. Then:
"Done. A hundred and twenty-three shares of Vinci SA. God help us."
"Thank you, Étienne."
"Don't thank me yet. Thank me when I have money."
He hung up.
I sat in the back of my mathematics class and watched the clock move toward nine a.m. and felt, for the first time in my life, the particular quality of waiting that only comes when something real is at stake — not exam results or football scores, but actual, numerical, consequential reality.
At nine-oh-two, the Euronext Paris opened.
Vinci SA opened at thirty-two euros and fifty-five cents.
I wrote the number in my notebook and began to wait.
Six weeks passed.
Six weeks of school, of library sessions, of my mother's cooking and my father's silences and the ordinary texture of a life that looked, from the outside, completely unchanged. I did my coursework. I ate my lunches. I answered questions in class when called upon and deflected them when they weren't academic.
And every evening, I checked the Vinci SA price.
Week one: thirty-two euros, eighty cents. Up slightly. Within noise. Week two: thirty-three euros, forty cents. Moving. Week three: thirty-three euros, ninety cents. Consistent. Week four: a dip — thirty-two euros, sixty cents. My phone buzzed with a message from Étienne. should we be worried. I replied: no. Hold. Week five: thirty-four euros, twenty cents. Étienne sent a single thumbs-up emoji and nothing else. Week six: the EU infrastructure legislation passed its third parliamentary reading, as expected. Three financial journalists wrote about it. Two of them mentioned Vinci SA specifically.
On the morning of week six, day four, I was in my third-period economics class — a subject I found simultaneously too slow and occasionally interesting — when my phone vibrated in my pocket.
I didn't take it out. Not in class. That was a rule I had set for myself because rules, once broken for small reasons, became unreliable for large ones.
I waited until the break.
Étienne had sent me a screenshot.
Vinci SA: thirty-six euros and eighty cents.
Below the screenshot, three words:
James. JAMES. JAMES.
I stared at the number. Thirty-six eighty. From thirty-two forty. A gain of thirteen-point-six percent on our position. On four thousand euros, that was five hundred and forty euros in profit — unrealised, still in the market, but real.
We were not at my target yet. Thirty-seven to thirty-nine. We held.
I typed back: Hold. Not yet.
His response: you're going to give me a heart attack and I'm nineteen years old
I almost smiled.
I put my phone away and went back to class.
On a Thursday morning, seven weeks and two days after we bought in, Vinci SA hit thirty-eight euros and fifteen cents.
I called Étienne before school.
"Sell," I said.
"Right now?"
"Right now. Market order, sell all."
I heard him moving fast — footsteps, a door, the sound of the app opening. Thirty seconds of silence. Then:
"Done. Sold." A pause. The sound of him doing arithmetic in his head, which he was faster at than most people expected. "James, that's — that's a gain of over seventeen percent. On four thousand euros that's—"
"Six hundred and eighty euros profit," I said. "Your fifteen percent is a hundred and two euros."
Silence.
Then, slowly: "I made a hundred and two euros while sleeping."
"Technically you made it over seven weeks."
"I made a hundred and two euros while sleeping and going to parties and watching television." Another pause. "This is real. This actually just happened."
"Yes."
"Okay." His voice had changed — taken on a quality I hadn't heard from him before. Something that lived between excitement and solemnity, the sound of someone understanding that a thing they had agreed to without fully believing in had just proven itself. "What's next?"
I looked at the panel.
I had been watching TotalEnergies for three weeks. The French energy giant, heavily weighted in the CAC 40, sitting at a price that my analysis suggested was slightly suppressed relative to its forward earnings potential. I had done the work. I had read the reports. I had built the thesis.
The panel showed: TotalEnergies — 71%. Long. 2–5 months.
"TotalEnergies," I said. "We put six thousand in this time."
"Six — James, that's the whole account minus the profit."
"Yes."
Pause. "Why more this time?"
"Because we were right about Vinci, and I'm confident in this one." I considered for a moment. "But if you're not comfortable, we do four thousand again. Same as before."
Étienne was quiet for a long moment.
"No," he said finally. "Six thousand. Let's do it."
And in the corner of my eye, the panel sat silent and patient, the way it always did.
I had made my first successful trade. I had proven the system to myself and, more importantly, proven it with real money and real stakes. I had learned that the panel was consistent and that my analysis could support it and that Étienne, given enough evidence, would follow where I led.
Everything was working.
I should have felt satisfied.
I didn't.
Because that evening, doing what I always did — running company names through my head, checking probabilities, mapping the landscape — I thought about Sasung Group.
The company whose facility had changed everything. Whose explosion had given me this.
The panel filled:
▣ SASUNG GROUP (GLOBAL) — KRX/EuronextSignal: Short (Sell)Probability: 89%Horizon: 1–2 months
I stared at it.
Eighty-nine percent. The highest number the panel had ever shown me. By twelve points.
And it was telling me to bet against them. To short Sasung — to take a position that would profit if the company's stock fell.
Which meant the panel believed Sasung Group's stock was about to collapse.
I sat very still in my bedroom, in the Lyon dark, and thought about what I knew about shorting a stock. About the mechanism of it. About what it would require. About the fact that I was seventeen years old with no brokerage account of my own and my entire operation ran through a friend's phone.
And then I thought about why the panel might be showing me this.
Because probabilities didn't come from nowhere. Even if I didn't understand the machinery behind the panel — even if I had accepted, on some level, that I never would — there was always a reason for a probability. Something in the market. Something in the company. Something that the panel was reading that I wasn't.
I opened my laptop.
I typed in Sasung Group.
And in the first three search results — in news articles dated within the last forty-eight hours, which I had not seen because I had been focused on TotalEnergies — I found something that made my breath stop.
A journalist in Seoul had published an investigation. A three-part series. The first part had dropped two days ago, the second yesterday, the third this morning.
It was about the Lyon facility.
About the explosion that had put me in hospital.
About the fact that, according to three anonymous sources inside Sasung's European division, the power system fault that had caused it was not an accident.
It had been covered up.
And the cover-up went significantly higher than a legal representative in a charcoal suit handing me a document to sign.
I read the article three times.
My arm — the burned one, the healed one — began to ache in the phantom way of injuries that are gone but not forgotten.
I sat in the dark with the panel showing 89% at the edge of my vision, and I understood, for the first time, that the eight thousand euros I had been given was not compensation.
It was silence money.
And someone, somewhere, had expected it to work.
End of Chapter 2
The Probability of Wealth — By J. Valmont
[Next Chapter → Chapter 3: "Short"]James makes the most dangerous trade of his life — against the company that put him in hospital. And the journalist in Seoul publishes her fourth article.