Beating the odds

I wouldn’t have expected to discover a new Jewish historical novel in a community forum on the financial website The Motley Fool . Yet there it was: a reader recommending Samanta Greene Woodruff’s The Trade Off , saying it explained the 1929 market crash in a way that could have inspired better decision-making during times of more recent market turmoil.

Indeed, The Trade Off puts us on Wall Street in the 1920s, through the eyes of Bea Abramovitz, a fictional character loosely based on stock market wiz Jesse Livermore, a legendary turn-of-the-century investor who made a fortune short-selling the Great Crash.

In an interview with writer Deborah Kalb, Woodruff shared her inspiration for The Trade Off. Woodruff was captivated by the 2021 GameStop “short squeeze,” in which hedge fund managers shorted GameStop stock (invested to gain as the price fell), then lost a fortune when amateur investors drove up the price.

Like those amateurs, protagonist Bea Abramovitz is an underdog despite her prodigious talent for math and numbers. With her father, she studies stocks in the financial pages. When her imaginary picks routinely beat the market, she dreams of becoming a broker, building a better life for her and her family. But the few women brokers in the 1920s are wealthy women with prestigious educations and well-connected families, whose connections bring in clients.

As a daughter of struggling Jewish immigrants, living on New York’s Lower East Side, those doors are closed. Instead, with tenacity, she parleys her talent into a position in JP Morgan’s Wire Room–where the ticket tape is read. She processes incoming information and analyzes patterns to become indispensable to her colleagues and to become the brains-behind-the-broker when she and her brother team up to beat the system.

The Trade Off is suspenseful, even though we know the crash is looming ahead. Woodruff delved into primary sources to provide a you-are-there view of 1920’s New York, from Wall Street offices to the clubs Abramovitz visits with her friends, drawn from period nightlife columns in The New Yorker .

Those friends are just some of the beautifully drawn characters who bring life to The Trade Off , supporting Abramovitz and each other. I found myself rooting for them all.

Betsy Gomberg reads (and sometimes writes about) Jewish books.