SLIPPERY
Oil? Well...
The Wolf of Wall Street
meets Fight Club...
in Asia
Riding his BMX home along Manly beachfront late one Friday night, fresh from plowing schooners and yelling at footy games, Flynn James (Slippery) receives a call from Scion Commodities' chief recruiter in Geneva. Flynn is invited to Scion's Singapore office for an interview. A junior trading role in physical oil and metals trading is up for grabs. Slippery seizes the chance with both hands and catapults into the trading world, working hard and playing harder, as he chases fast money and attempts very unsuccessfully to avoid the pitfalls lurking in the gritty underbellies of Southeast Asia.
Slippery Paperback
signed by the author
(Prices incl. shipping,
takes 3-4 weeks)
SLIPPERY EXCERPT
Copyright © Liam Carroll 2015
AUTHOR'S PREFACE
Towards your final years of secondary schooling, you will most likely be forced to take a seat opposite a careers counsellor. Staring across the table at you, an earnest man or woman, well groomed and ill informed, covered in cheap fragrant enhancers and even cheaper clothing, will politely guide you through the world that exists beyond the school’s perimeter - a frightening world where you have to earn a living.
What do you want to do with your life? What do you want to be?
The usual worn out paths will no doubt be considered. Medicine, law, engineering, building, accounting, even teaching may earn a mention. The phrase, a hard day’s work for a fair day’s pay, will likely fill your eardrums with misdirected anticipation of how the outside world functions.
It’s rare a student will see straight through the well-intended farcical conversation and be brazen enough to say hey listen, I just want to make fuckloads of cash! In a world where cash is King, a student with the clarity of thought to ponder such a query is well on the road to righteousness.
​
I was not that kid. I was bright eyed, freckle covered and cursed with adolescent notions of compassionate purpose. I chose physiotherapy, completing the requisite academic hoops and jump ropes to receive a piece of paper signed by a dean and stamped with University of Sydney insignia. Well done.
I continued on to endure a few years of having my good nature beaten out of me, my life consumed with endless thirty-minute appointments of pure misery. Patients would stare longingly into my eyes, believing I could somehow touch them like Jesus and wipe their pain clear. Meanwhile, men and women with dollar signs in their eyes and vacuums between their ears were banking bonuses that made my hip pocket weep and my heart fill with spiteful fury.
What were these people doing all day in those investment banks and trading firms anyway? The careers counsellor never laid out what exactly was going on at the top of the corporate ladder in those flashy office buildings.
I would have to work it out on my own.