Bum tips

Warren Livermore slipped out of the grand black granite entrance of the Saloman Plaza and rounded the corner. Firing up his e-cig, he tilted his head back, closed his eyes and inhaled deeply. His white button up shirt was undone at the neck and his pink and purple check tie was loose at the collar. He smiled at a colleague who walked past. Her name was Julie or Jackie, something like that. They never spoke to each other, just smiled, he'd known her three years, or rather; he hadn't known her for three years. Warren didn't really dig brunettes, but in the spandex uniform of her lunchtime spin class she looked pretty peachy.

Warren unrolled his sleeves, folded his arms and tried to stop a shiver coursing through him. Perhaps the wind had been this icy in the morning, hard to tell from the seat of a Ferrari, but he was sure it wasn't this arctic. Warren could feel his hairs standing on end, and visualised his pinstripe suit jacket hanging on the back of his swivel chair in the office.

Warren stopped to have a look at his reflection in the polished stone wall. The glow of the electronic cigarette pulsed as he took a hit; he let it hang limp in his mouth while he inspected himself. He ran his fingers through his fauxhawk and let his palms caress his face. You couldn't call the designer fir on his face a beard, it was more like neatly arranged fluff, his live-in girlfriend Rachael wasn't a fan, but Katrina and Susanna seemed to enjoy it, so the fuzz stayed. People often called him Pretty Boy, even his staid boss cracked jokes that he should be modelling underwear not trading stocks. Warren scratched his chin and took another puff on his vape. Nobody would be calling him that today, a week of high pressure shifts, bad decisions, unrelenting research and sleep replaced with coffee and Red Bull put paid to that.

Warren took a few more steps around the building, partly to keep warm and partly to think about the dive in value of an auto parts manufacturer he had bought at the wrong time last week that had wiped out a month of unspectacular gains. He walked towards a vent that blasted hot air from the building, it felt nice and warm. Beside it was an alcove with the bins of the plaza. He saw a dirty boot poking out and curiosity got the better of him. Warren peered around the corner. Some homeless guy in a stained rain mac stared at a crumpled and slightly wet copy of the New York Times business pages. The tramp's eyes darted over to the arrival of Warren's shadow, but he didn't look up.

Warren grinned.

'Got any hot picks down there grandpa?'

The homeless guy looked up at Warren. The tramp had looked much older to Warren while he concentrated on the paper, a brow full of wrinkles. Now on closer inspection the guy was clearly not much over fifty, similar age to Warren's father. The homeless guy went back to reading his paper.

'Nothing keeping me warm at the moment,' he said. 'I know what I wouldn't pick though.' He chuckled to himself. 'Nobody's going to be buying products from RWT Controls now that NCAP have cited design flaws in their fuel pumps were the cause of those fires.'

Warren's cheeks burned red.

'Ok bright spark, where would your cheddar be going?'

'In my mouth mostly,' he grumbled, rubbing his stomach, 'but if I had some leftover I'd be throwing it at Ghifford.'

Warren grunted.

'The pharmaceutical company? Are you still in 1995? That dinosaur hasn't turned a profit since 2009, its sales and market share diminishes every year.'

The vagabond jabbed the paper with his finger.

'I know they've fallen out of favour these days. They fell off the patent cliff in a big way a decade ago and all their blockbuster drugs got ripped by the generic manufacturers, but they have been steadily plugging away every last bit of cash into a new research and development area in diabetes. They have a real humdinger in their third phase pipeline; when the Drug Administration approve it, you watch those revenues explode. There is nothing better than a cash cow with government protection for 20 years.'