Overwhelming Returns
I’m translating the chapter into publication-style HTML now, keeping the prose natural and preserving the scene breaks and dialogue shifts. The only special block here is the final scene-break line, which I’ll render as a divider rather than plain text.CHAPTER_TITLE: Overwhelming Returns
On a crisp early-autumn evening in Annenberg Hall.
It was a Gothic building raised in red brick, with spires that seemed to stab at the sky and immense stained-glass windows filled with scenes from the Civil War.
Step inside, and you found a dining hall that looked as though it had wandered out of some future book about a wizard, perhaps one being plotted even now by an unknown female author who had only just begun shaping the idea in her head.
High ceilings. Long wooden tables lined up in rows.
Originally, this place had been built in the late nineteenth century to honor Harvard graduates who had died in the Civil War.
But time had gone on, and now it had become a freshmen-only cafeteria, thick with the smell of French fries and ketchup.
Harvard students who ate here joked about the “four lies Harvard tells.”
- First, We seek truth.
- Second, We educate leaders for humanity.
- Third, We proudly uphold 350 years of tradition.
And fourth, the line printed day after day on the menu board at the cafeteria entrance.
- Fourth, Today’s Special is Delicious!
So was Harvard’s food really bad enough for students to mock it like that?
Unfortunately, yes.
That was what campus dining in America in the 1990s usually amounted to: pizza with dried, rubbery edges; brown casseroles of unknown origin; spaghetti with meatballs that had long since given up all moisture; and a salad bar whose only vegetables worthy of the name were boiled broccoli and canned corn.
The place looked like a European cathedral, but the food tasted no better than mess-hall rations.
The cafeteria was noisy, full of first-years clutching plastic trays in line while the scrape of chairs rose from every direction.
And off by the windows, at a corner table, sat one man alone.
Bald, with a sharp aquiline nose, thick horn-rimmed glasses, a black turtleneck, baggy jeans, and worn-out shoes.
Professor Warren Cromwell.
Under normal circumstances, he would have been eating lunch with his fellow professors at the faculty club, but today he had deliberately come down to the freshmen cafeteria and taken a seat by himself.
It was an old habit of his: whenever his mind grew crowded, he ate alone.
On his plate sat meatloaf, mashed potatoes, and a heavy brown gravy.
For a professor in his mid-fifties, it was the safest possible choice.
And yet his fork had been suspended in midair for some time.
His gaze was fixed somewhere beyond the plate, in empty space.
He had not come to Annenberg today for the food.
There was only one name filling his head.
Lee Sanha.
Again and again, he found himself thinking of the mock-investment results that had hit a total of plus 109.39% in just three weeks.
His own virtual capital of $100,000 had swelled to $209,395, almost doubling in a matter of weeks.
...It was far too disciplined to dismiss as beginner’s luck. We need students like that in our graduate program.
In fifteen years of teaching, this was the first time he had ever felt his competitive instincts ignite this fiercely toward a student.
Professor Cromwell took a thin pen from the inside pocket of his coat.
He began writing numbers on the napkin on the table.
On the first line, he wrote his own cumulative result:
$100,000 → $145,820 (+45.82%)
The product of the classic strategy he had built over the past few weeks by stacking blue-chip names like Chevron, Raytheon, and Coca-Cola with a little sector timing layered in.
Below that, he wrote Sanha’s number.
$100,000 → $209,395 (+109.39%)
A figure that had turned the principal into more than double in only a few weeks.
The tip of the pen stopped for a moment in the air.
With blue chips and sensible risk control, he could not catch the shape of that student’s curve.
To close the gap meaningfully by next week, there was only one answer: go for a single, massive home run.
“Hmm. I can’t exactly hand out an A+ as things stand. That would be unprecedented in my teaching career.”
A high-risk strategy surfaced in his mind.
Momentum chasing.
Buying into a stock as it surged intraday, trying to maximize short-term gains by riding the burst.
There was an old student he had once worked alongside on Wall Street, Michael, who now worked at Solomon Brothers’ New York office.
One phone call to Michael, and he could probably get a tip on which ticker was attracting the so-called hot money right before the close.
Professor Cromwell’s gaze drifted to the payphone mounted against one wall of Annenberg.
But then he stopped himself.
That’s no way for a professor to think.
The instant he started pulling unpublished information through personal connections, this contest would no longer be a fair game.
A professor could not cheat a student with cowardly tricks.
He would do this the right way.
He would find a stock on the verge of explosion using only public information, charts, and the news.
That was the minimum line an educator had to keep.
He struck several of the names on the napkin with a decisive X.
Too much gap, too weak a body. And the volume only spikes for a day.
After a long stare, he finally circled one ticker.
“Well. I don’t think I ever focused this hard even on preparing for my own classes.”
Still, it had been a while since he had met a freshman who made his blood run this fresh.
He felt as though he had become ten years younger. Maybe twenty.
* * *
A week later, as the lecture was drawing to a close.
Once again, it was time to check the returns.
The teaching assistant rolled an OHP cart up to the lectern.
The students began to murmur.
“They’re announcing the results again today.”
“Sanha had +109% last time, right? The professor had +45%.”
“He said he was bringing out a trump card too. I’m really looking forward to this.”
The assistant placed the film on the screen.
As always, the first line showed Professor Cromwell’s name and return.
“This week, Professor Warren Cromwell’s mock-investment return is... plus 222% on a weekly basis. On a cumulative basis, the initial $100,000 is now worth roughly $470,000. I’ll hand out the detailed printout later.”
At those words, the room collectively dropped its jaw.
“222%? If that had been real money, he would have made more in that short time than my dad earns in a year.”
“That’s insane. He took the loss last week and came back completely awakened. Is that what real professor skill looks like?”
“At this rate, nobody’s getting an A+ for real, are they?”
“No, seriously, why did the professor decide to get serious at the end?”
Professor Cromwell raised a hand and quieted them down.
“Even with age, losing remains something I dislike. Since I wanted to keep Mr. Lee Sanha in my class, I tried a strategy I almost never talk about with students. I would not recommend it to any of you.”
Cromwell stepped beside the OHP and wrote down the stock that had become today’s centerpiece.
Biomedix Pharmaceuticals, ticker BIOX.
“For the past six months, this stock had not managed to break above the $30 level. That’s what we call resistance. A wall.”
Grace raised her hand.
“The $30 resistance had been there before too. Was there any special reason you thought it would break through this time?”
“Good question, Miss Grace. Come to think of it, that stock was in your portfolio too, wasn’t it? Though it seems you sold it before I did.”
At Cromwell’s words, Grace nodded.
Then he continued.
“The key was volume. In the earlier breakout attempts, volume only reached two or three times normal, but this time it was more than five times. That was a signal that this wasn’t an ordinary retail crowd buying; someone with information was vacuuming up shares.”
He went on explaining while sketching the chart on the board.
“On Monday morning, the moment I saw it push hard through that $30 line, I put about 30% of total capital in around $31. The stop-loss line was $28, with the premise that I would not let the maximum loss exceed 10%. The next morning, the news came out that the FDA panel had issued a positive opinion, and as soon as the market opened it gapped up to $40. I sold half near $42 and liquidated the rest around $48.”
The students listened in silence.
“To be honest, by Monday afternoon I thought I had failed. It had fallen to $28.5. That was only fifty cents above my stop-loss line. I was even wondering how I would show my face in class the next week if the professor of investment theory got stopped out.”
Laughter broke out among the students.
“In the end, this week’s return was about half skill and half luck. People like to say luck is skill too, but an investment that depends only on luck is the road to ruin. Please remember that momentum chasing like this is a dangerous toy even for someone who can read market flow, the quality of catalysts, and the structure of the float all at once. If you repeat the same pattern ten times, seven of them will end badly.”
Professor Cromwell clapped his hands.
“All right. Let the assistant continue with the remaining results.”
The assistant rattled through the names and returns.
“Hounded, +5.9%. Scorsese, +6.8%. Hector, +1.5%. Grace, +35.9%.”
At the end, Grace’s impressive return drew a murmur of admiration.
She, too, was showing a remarkably clean upward curve.
Overall, the class’s average returns were excellent.
It seemed many of them had started subscribing to Disclosure after the previous lesson’s know-how had been revealed.
At last, the assistant called the final name.
“And finally, Lee Sanha. This week’s return is...”
The assistant checked the printout again.
“+3%.”
The lecture hall erupted in a wave of murmurs.
“3%? Lee Sanha?”
“He had 109% last week, and this week it’s only 3%?”
“That’s a complete bust. The professor’s at 222%.”
“Well, it’s not exactly a bust. Three percent in that short a time is still impressive.”
“True. He’s never once gone negative so far.”
“Still, given everything he’s done until now, this does feel like a failure.”
“No, it really is a failure. 3% isn’t even better than bank interest.”
“Bank interest is on a yearly basis. He’s doing it weekly.”
“Honestly, in the stock market 3% is the sort of number that can show up in a few hours, maybe even a few minutes, so that probably makes it look worse.”
“Maybe he cashed out at the end, or maybe he got hammered in some other position?”
“Right. If he only made 3% in the final week, doesn’t that mean Grace beats him on final return too?”
Everyone was whispering.
Grace turned around and looked at Sanha.
There was confusion in her eyes, mixed with a little disappointment.
Meanwhile, Professor Cromwell let out a breath of relief.
“Mr. Lee, it seems you took a more cautious approach this week. That too was a fine choice. There’s no need to attack every week. Risk management matters more than reckless betting. My cumulative return is about 370%, so... yes, I suppose you’ve finally overtaken me this week.”
Professor Cromwell gathered up his lecture materials.
“In any case, it was a splendid contest. Thanks to all of you, I’ve had a very thrilling few weeks. But this is not the end. Starting next class, we’ll move on to another practical exercise...”
Just then, the teaching assistant raised a hand in a rush.
“Wait, Professor!”
Every eye in the lecture hall turned at once to the assistant.
Cromwell asked, “What is it?”
The assistant clutched the paper as though he might crumple it in his fist.
“I... I read the numbers wrong. The decimal point... no, the line break was printed strangely, and it carried over to the next page, so... I mean, Lee Sanha’s return this week wasn’t +3% and...”
The room fell silent.
After checking the numbers again, the assistant spoke each word distinctly.
“...+3,021%.”