Glossary

Craig's wife. Born Alyssa Seward, raised in Calgary. Strathcona-Tweedsmuir School, then Queen's University in Kingston. She is, by any measure, a woman who could have married anyone she wanted and made the calculation that Craig was the right answer — a calculation Craig is aware of and occasionally unsettled by.

She lives with Craig in a large, traditional red brick house in the Annex. On her own she is worth approximately $18 million. She also stands to inherit a third of her father's $4.5 billion oil and gas fortune, a fact that does not go unmentioned in Craig's internal monologue.

Craig is the author and narrator of these entries. He works on an institutional trading desk — Bay Street, Canada's financial centre — and has done so for the better part of two decades. He covers small and mid-cap equities, which means he spends a lot of time thinking about liquidity, microstructure, and the gap between what a company is worth and what the market says it's worth on any given day.

He started writing partly out of frustration: the financial commentary he found online either talked down to readers or assumed they already knew everything. He wanted something in between. A letter to a reasonably smart friend who has never stared at a Bloomberg terminal at 7:45 in the morning.

He uses a pseudonym here. The views are his own. They do not represent his employer, his clients, or anyone's position, long or short.

Sean McCarthy's wife. Born Marnie Stewart. North Toronto High School, then Western University in London, Ontario. Lives with Sean in Chestnut Park. Net worth approximately $130 million.

She makes appearances in Craig's stories largely as a fixed point in Sean's orbit — the reason Sean does or doesn't do certain things, the person whose schedule determines whether a trip happens or doesn't. Craig seems to regard her with the particular fondness reserved for people whose presence in your life is entirely someone else's doing.

Craig's closest friend and colleague on the desk. Grew up in Vancouver, went to Kitsilano Secondary School, and then Queen's University in Kingston — where he and Craig presumably found each other and decided the world owed them both a great deal.

Sean lives in Chestnut Park, Toronto, with his wife Marnie. Net worth approximately $130 million. He has the self-awareness to know he is lucky and the self-confidence to believe he also deserves it. Craig seems to find both qualities useful in a friend.