To read an interview between Stockhouse publisher, executive editor Darin Diehl and Thom Calandra click here for Part one, and here for Part two.

For thousands of investors who profited in years past from the meteoric rise of commodities, mining, and small- to mid-sized life science and technology companies, Thom Calandra acted as a beacon. In the later years of the last decade and for several years at the start of this one, Calandra helped his followers find value in the plethora of investment choices before them. A longtime print and wire journalist, he co-founded MarketWatch.com some 12 years ago. He was the website’s editor-in-chief, an award-winning columnist, a television commentator on the CBS network and a broadcaster for MarketWatch in San Francisco and London. Under Calandra’s stewardship, MarketWatch's news team rose to almost 100 journalists. The company later became CBS MarketWatch, was sold in 2005 to Dow Jones & Co. for more than $500 million, and will soon become a News Corp. property. Calandra resigned in 2004 after failing to disclose in proper and legal fashion the buying and selling of stocks he was recommending in his investment newsletter, The Calandra Report. Thom settled his case with the U.S. Securities & Exchange Commission one year later. He is currently at work in California on a novel, "Pablo by Numbers" and also operates the site ThomCalandra.com.

Over the next two weeks Stockhouse will feature excerpts from Calandra's novel, the story of a newsletter writer, peripatetic financiers and a global chase for capital during the market "melt up."

Copyright © 2007, Thom Calandra

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY AUTHOR

After Picasso had earned eternal fame, the artist found he could scrawl drawings, using a pencil, strokes of lipstick on a tablecloth, or charcoal across a torn paper bag, in return for meals ... and other favors.

Chapter One

Our Narrator

This isn't about Pablo's scrip. It's about mine. You see I was a writer that winter, but some called me a promoter, a pied-piping booster of other people's money. I was that diddler in the stock market who minted the term "melt-up."

After I'd clocked notoriety in the stock market, thanks to my "Melt-Up" alerts and the hordes of investors, sugar-doused whoopee cushions they were, hop-scotching to my laptop slapshots, I found I could scrawl my tickered wisdom at table and dine like an earl, just like the famous artist. Did that cast me as crank artist, flake and fraud? What people, my subs first and foremost, a waiter or flight attendant or grocery bagger, paid me in kind for a few letters of stock ticker in my boxy, oversized scratch, on a scrap of note-paper, a trattoria napkin, a square of tissue paper from les toilettes even … well, we're talking biblical returns here. Everyone near the peak wanted a piece of the market melt-up, up as in price, and who wouldn't, watching the number on a denominated piece of paper get so hot, it was near melting down, but all the while the paper kept rising, up, because hot air rises, always my life-altering tickers beamed on the wireless, tongue-teasing the cracked lips of my slab of subs, my audience of grocery clerks and burger flippers who wanted to become the next millionaires on their blocks without even greasing a wheel: well, who wouldn't?

At the time, I didn't know it, cradling my Queen of Toshiba from inside a clappy California condo, transmitting my melt-ups to deep-pockets as far flung as Dubai and Cape Town, Medellin and Moscow. I was in the zone, I figured, wired on the wireless in a place called Strawberry, where on most mornings the yelps of harbor seals punctuated the not unpleasant sound of city-bound traffic across the Richardson Bay Bridge a mile from my kitchen, the cars sounding like lapping waves off Malibu if you set your ears to it, and where just outside my door a channel of brackish water widened into the Golden Gate. See, I just didn't know it. I didn't reckon, as I munched my signature sustenance, vodka-drenched Meyer lemons, yellow skin-'n-all, plucking them right from the floppy bush in my front yard, cradling that laptop like wireless booty from above, I never for a moment ... realized ... I'd ... reached ... my ... numbered ... summit.

I was the Melt-Up infused, and the Melt-Up was vested in me. My subs, thousands of Joeys and Josephines, lived through me. For this crowd, I was just as good as TV or a guest pass at the spa, maybe better. In one 12-day stretch I circled the globe twice, supper-clubbed in Beijing and London on the same day. Got this close to the next president of China and more importantly, the current president of the Bank of China and his No. 1, a mealy mouthed wisp of a matron who could have been your waitress at the local kung-fu chicken but instead controlled close to a half-billion dollars in one of China's multiplying sovereign wealth funds, both of them sharing a round table with me at a Hong Kong banquet where the crispy eel was snaked in a chili paste chunkier, spicier and more crimson than even hot sauces in the most southern state of Mexico, and the Shanghai hairy crab was stir-fried with sea urchins and an exquisite splicing of farm-fresh ginger. Swam laps at 3 in the morning in a Dubai hotel pool, on a rooftop 40 stories high, me staring down through goggled eyeballs at a polished-stone mosaic of some horrible dragon myth, shimmering beneath 10 feet of water. Ate foie-gras-stuffed hamburger on slates of Lebanese flat bread, for breakfast even and spread before me on a red and gold table cloth, feeling sassy I was in plush leather seating on a streaking Gulfstream IV or V, maybe 30,000 feet above Morocco's dimpled Ajax. Shook hands with Elton John less than a minute after he wrapped up "Rocket Man" for some big-wigged merchant bankers on a yacht the size of a soccer field just off Grand Cayman. Had Pele the soccer star to myself for two whole minutes in an alcove of a lakeside Geneva restaurant. Okay, maybe it was in les toilettes we mingled, it was still Pele. Slept in an 18th century bed about a mile wide at some English country estate frequented by the royals and their cashew gallery of ladies, lots of young and old ladies and their shampooed mini-Doodle poodles. Most of all, I helped through the power of my script -- and a troupe of silk-suited metals miners and market financiers with their origami paper tricks -- I helped engineer a clutch of reverse-stock transfers and other magical feats of multiplication, ticker physics that beamed into my world, and theirs, and into the slums of my parched subs in their garages and attics and burger joints, beamed to them all the liquidity that comes with a hot stock and a hopping commodity.

I was peaking in that Strawberry flat, and I was about to be spent, devoured by the federales, all because I'd made thousands of ordinary folks boatloads of money, and in the ticker hunt, those B-rods of mine did not have to lift a finger or burn a calorie of brain energy to turn the tricks because I was the A-Rod, Mister Melt-Up at the heart of the hive, scribe of all trades. All my subs had to do was read my electronic lips and accept my treasury of tickers and my global romps in their portfolios and in their imaginations. They did, the subs, and gladly, in exchange for chump-change monthly subscription fees that added up when my audience grew to thousands and thousands, and every one of them loved the zoomy ride they took each day or week, reading the reports I beamed on the wireless, probably loved the read as much as they cherished the pay dirt of my ticker payoffs. So when the federales punctured my dream bubble, a rude day or two before Christmas, on a Saturday no less, sending their notice of inquiry via an garish purple and orange Fed-Ex truck, I knew my Melt-Up ticker factory and its author, yours cruelly, were worse than toast. The meltdown was just ahead, and we were no better than one of those overpriced tuna-melts on sourdough, the ones with heirloom tomatoes and the baby pickle on the side, what you buy when you're killing time on the Tiburon ferry landing, waiting for your boat to come in with all the commuters who wear their sneakers on the boat, then switch to dress shoes for the trek to their SF tower offices. The ferry landing was just down the hill from my Strawberry condo, my mortgaged little pad with the kitchen-window view of Richardson Bay, my tiny piece of turf on the shore of a suburban county drenched in wealth. That ferry landing in downtown Tiburon, California, that's where I wound up after Fed-Ex did its dirty work, me walking like the hollowed-out lead in a zombie movie. I could just as well been sleep walking to that rickety little boat pier.

But first: my name, my Melt-Up byline, is Robbie Thom. I held the distinction of being "that writer in California" with possibly the fastest growing stock market newsletter in the short history of the business. For a fistful of fast and furious months, anyway, hundreds of subscribers were signing on each and every day, even on weekends, willing to pay me $10, $20, $30 a month for the tickers I put on my electronic marquee.

Once I hit stride, got the motion down pat, I was on the rail. The more my audience of subs grew, the less time I spent in the saddle of my Strawberry coven. Like the most successful writers in the business of dispensing stock tips, I was spending most of my time in hotel lobbies, at investment conferences and on planes, spreading the gospel of Melt-Up. Some of the flight attendants on Air Dubai and Singapore Air and Swiss Air even greeted me by name, without a glance at their cheat-sheet seat rosters. One of them, on a flight to Hong Kong, welcomed me with an upgrade to first class, from business, and slipped me two chocolate-dipped cherries in cognac, the bittersweet ones that are so addictive you wonder if they're classified by the drug enforcement agencies. Her name, the attendant, was Fatima, a slender Cantonese gal the other attendants nicknamed Fatty. Like most Chinese I met in my travels, Fatty was hooked on the stock market, said she read every Melt-Up alert as soon as her airtime was complete and she had de-boarded, scanning her handheld for the latest candied ticker beamed from Strawberry. Me taking a cue from the artist, I tore a tiny piece of a magazine and scribbled her a new one in the cylinder of this jet, a ticker I mean, scrawled the few letters that represented a fledgling but promising copper mine operating in Mali. Pennies a share -- the subs loved those as much as the stories I told about breaking bread and mixing it up with the oversized characters and shady tycoons who popped in and out of our Melt-Up cosmos. See, everyone wanted a slice of the Melt-Up. Didn't matter if I was lifting the curtain on a heap of rusty drill rigs in Africa or a one-room front of an office with empty filing cabinets and five guys on the horn 18 hours a day in some Detroit back-alley. I pronounced. The subs bought. It was rapturous. At the time.

I was parabolic, full of me and fueled by me. Maybe a week before my parabola flattened, a throwaway comment from a Russian merchant banker, as we gallivanted inside a marbled Moscow casino, previewed for me the geometry lesson, complete with needle-sharp compass point, I was about to have drilled into my skull cap. The crowd, I recall, was on Neglinnaya Street in the dead of winter. Dark days. An hour or two of light at midday in that horrific city, and not even that if cloud cover and sky gunk didn't loosen their holds on the sun's cameo appearance. A high-flying Canadian mining tycoon, the most successful of the fast-moving financiers in a commodities market that was melting up in price, was staging a celebration for a reverse stock transfer that had a handful of Moscow's wax-figure billionaires, usually stone faced with hooded eyes and permanent slouches, tippling and goggling and tossing dollar bills and euro notes at a bizarre contortionist act on stage, like they were playing some carnie game. It wasn't really a contortionist, but she came close, this Russian beauty, swinging on a set design that was supposed to look like a jungle, an arctic jungle, frosted like the ice city outside the casino's gilded front doors. Except the frost onstage was white cake frosting, or one hopes so, this being Moscow it easily could have been cocaine or procaine or toxic epoxy that she was licking like a serpent with a swift and impossibly long tongue her make-up artist had painted green, a golden stripe slicked down the middle and all the way into her tonsils it seemed. She was a real ice sculpture in the making, this one. Her arctic scene was sprinkled with gold dust, glitter that represented the new mining venture this financier from Canada and our gala casino host, fellow by name of Freedman, and his Russian partners had established in, of all places, western Siberia.

It was quite a party, and I was there as revered scribe and electronic wise guy, as in font of ticker wisdom, a newsletter lap-topper whose growing band of loyal subscribers gobbled up like manna unleavened the anointed, and highly speculative, stock tips of my Melt-Up, the people's report. Let me say as a proper matter of full disclosure, I was there as mooching revered scribe, my flights and hotels and massages and meals, manicures too, on the comp, courtesy of stock promoters, mining tycoons, corporate treasuries, merchant banks and what I thought was an infinite roster of marketing allowances from companies whose hungry execs forever were looking for ways to make their stocks appetizing to new investors, especially the thousands of little people I counted as my eager beaver Melt-Up audience.

This party was not for little people who flew budget airlines, though, and that would be me a year or two ago before I hit my ticker-rocking stride. No, this Moscow bazaar was for the swingers, most of them Russian, who had managed to capitalize on their nation's flight from the stone soup of the commune as they set themselves at the table, first sipping politely, then saying to heck with it, grabbing the bowl and guzzling the bird's nest soup of the big egg, the wonderful all mighty buck, while 99.5 percent of the rest of their nation ate sauerkraut. Moscow these days had more billionaires, on paper anyway, than any city in the world. Half of those rich guys were at the casino that evening, seemed like, goggling the girl on stage and overjoyed they had thrown their rubled lot into this latest commodity quest, a Siberian gold and graphite mine in the portfolio of a manicured financier whose track record of success for his investors was close to 80 percent, an astounding number that meant four of every five people made money with our host that evening, Mr. Freedman, someone I had crossed paths with a dozen or so times, visiting his various properties spotting the planet's surface, hitching a ride on one of his private jets, attending his parties, mixing with his entourage, sharing his bed, his acupuncturist's bed specifically, and me all the while taking notes on the way he entranced his audiences, be they at a casino stage show like this one or mixing at a gala Barcelona barbecue or sitting shoulder to shoulder, all knocked-kneed, inside a humid hotel conference room with a single overhead projector and the financial returns it was projecting for the worthy investors, the ones willing to listen without asking ridiculous questions like: When was the last time this region or sub-region definitively yielded mineralized deposits of gold or silver or nickel or copper? This fellow Freedman hypnotized the world's deep pockets with forecasts of bold geology, in this case Siberian gold and graphite, and on other occasions, platinum, nickel, copper, coal and even diamonds. The fellow was an upper-case Success, able to raise the cash his crews needed so they could drill and dig and scrape and heave and haul dirt that essentially became portable paper, stock market paper, which I knew was worth a lot more than all of the metal bars stacked inside all of the underground bank vaults in the northern hemisphere.

This was the last time I remember seeing Freedman, a whisper-thin man with the chiseled high cheek bones of a Cherokee and a standing requirement to have his feet massaged the moment he checked into whatever five or fifteen-star hotel he happened to be passing through. Several weeks prior, whilst he was getting a rubdown of his tootsies inside his room at The Peninsula in London, he'd described in a sentence or two what it took to make a million bucks, then 10 million, then 100 million, and keep multiplying by two. "The first unit is the hardest. Once you're there, you take a mental picture of what got you there, then you scale it up and you don't look back." A week after that, in a hop across the channel, Freedman gave me more personal advice, what he considered a warning worthy of a seer, which was to beware stock promoters, and one promoter in particular, one Manny Drinkwater, "Uncle Manny and his poxed paper," as this Freedman, our lord of the skies, called the promoter and his attached carpetbag of stock certificates. That was a gazebo moment in a different city, Barcelona, but a similar kind of Freedman party for rich people and their agents looking to become richer on the promise of drill bits sunk into the crust of the earth's ice and desert, mountain, mesa and steppeland.

On this Moscow evening, Freedman, fresh off his streaking Gulfstream V, or IV, or VC, or whatever these sky toys are called these days, was feeling his oats, and breaking from personal habit, he was sharing a glass of wine, sherry it was, with a guest, and this was something, whether it was breaking bread or toasting, that he rarely did with his crowd.

As we all watched the young lady on the stage in a gymnastics routine worthy of any Olympic champ, one of the rich guys, a real whale this one, with those Russian whiskers like black-eyed peas spotting his face from above the eyebrows down through the neck line, and beneath that for all I knew, came up to Freedman. I was noshing on the deviled eggs. "You know," says this large fellow whose name tag labeled him a white-gloved local banker for mightily wealthy clients, his belly full of whatever it was that newbie billionaires and their fiscal servants in Moscow drink, and tipping his champagne flute toward the stage, "this one, she is the Paris Hilton of Russia. For real. Quite a beauty. Nastrovya."

The Russian's English was rather quite good, and Freedman, for his part, played true to form, not really acknowledging that he had received anything from this social exchange, but his lips turning slightly upward at the corners of the mouth, just slightly mind you, as a way of at least confirming he had heard the guy.

But me, my mouth full of egg, I did a double take. I got the nastrovya part. Cheers to you, too, buddy. But what was that about the Hilton in Paris? The one near the Eiffel Tower on Avenue de Suffren? I squinted at the stage, which now had a vapor effect from hot ice, but what I saw wasn't a hotel, just a Russian goddess in a G-string swinging through an arctic landscape, and the rich guys still showering her with currency as she performed acrobatic movements with her tongue skating across the faux ice.

So the truth is out. I had no idea who Paris Hilton was. Toward the end of that evening, when word began to get around that there was an American writer in the room who did not know the story of Paris, Hilton, that is. the Russian banker who labeled the stage performer Russia's version of a wild and crazy rich kid came over to me and whispered, "C'est vrai? You really do not know?"

I knew that Moscow had more billionaires per capita than any other city on the planet. I could quote the top-20 market caps of the world's largest publicly traded securities. I knew by heart the mineralization levels of a dozen mines on five continents. I knew how reverse transfer equity makeovers worked magic on a penny-ante company's balance sheet. I knew how to spell the first middle and last names of a hundred CEOs. And I knew by heart a thousand tickers, maybe more. But I didn't know who Paris Hilton was, and thus, full of all things, I failed. On your tombstone, my wife, my ex-wife now, used to tell me often, sweetly but often, on your stone they're going to put: He Wasn't Paying Attention. "I just hope the truck makes quick work of it," she'd append. "Hospitals smell like bad apple sauce."

In the weeks after my number was up/The reporters like vicious whippets looking for the white-collar creep as they camped outside my front door/And the fair-weather fans denouncing me on their Web sites, threatening loathsome actions against me/The blasted DOUBLE DEALING WIZ TICKS OFF FEDS headlines/And the attorneys, the securities enforcers, the bad coffee and the waiting-waiting-waiting while my torso shed the pounds of my fiduciary gluttony and I became thin again as a teen/And hurting most of all, my hedgerow of subs spitting my simpatico down the gutter/Now I no longer had a platinum pen/Even the Safeway baggers sniping and smirking as I passed through/The ass-wipes.

I suppose if I had known who Miss Hilton was at that moment in that dreadful Moscow casino, I would have sidestepped my public tumble and disgrace with poise, like a ballet dancer, is that how it goes? Because I would have what, would have been paying attention and not reveling in the life form I wake up to every single day, which was me, me and only me?

After my fall off my Trojan Ticker, at the hands of that bright and chipper Fed-Ex delivery gal whose face I can never erase from my memory, but still, as my legal counsel correctly forecast, weeks and neuralgic weeks away from hitting the bottom of my barrel, my ankles anchored deep in my own sweat-soaked suite of a shingled Purgatory; after the authorities had hoovered me into the headlines and I'd collapsed into my own stink-branded sewer, I saw what the feds had really accomplished with a mere two-page notice of inquiry. My life as I knew it had ended. The federales, just doing their securities mongering job from inside some quake-proofed SF tower, those underpaid, freshly scrubbed dot.gov samaritans had FedEx-ed me out of existence.

I had considered myself, for 20 years, a ripening California lemon-head, hijacking myself from bitterly cold Rochester, New York, just after college, working a decade-long string of small and then big newspapers, marrying, marinating, mortgaging, picking blackberries from the bramble of bushes outside my Strawberry door, just beyond the bushy lemon tree and straddling a rotting redwood fence … and then discovering a few years ago two things that boosted my metabolic rate and the size of my portfolio: 1. mountain biking and 2. electronic newsletters. Both took me to peaks. The mountain biking was with Pablo, my postman. The newsletters were with tens of thousands of fawning readers, my faithful subs, at the peak of what I called the melt-up, the inexorable flow of cash into paper securities that represent baby-faced little companies, like a lava flow, only flowing uphill, defying gravity.

And so, suffering from my neuralgic nightmare, I'm here to spill my insides. What else can I do but split open the wobbly horse I was so abruptly tossed from -- my shrink-wrap says I tossed myself from the stallion, that I snatched defeat, hooves and all, from the jaws of victory, and all because of my crooked pen -- split the four-legged horse open and start sharing the booty? Could there be a few hundred left of my tens of thousands, a handful of supreme subs left, those still hoping, praying I'm not a ticker shark, that me and my Melt-Up didn't pull off what the hound drooling press called, what those jackals called a "calculated fiscal betrayal?"

I'm here to spill, and I think there'll be heck to pay when the janitor swings by to scrape the carpet.

Copyright © 2007, Thom Calandra

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED BY AUTHOR

“Pablo by Numbers” is a work of fiction. All characters in the novel are the work of the author’s imagination and bear no resemblance to people living or dead.

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