Chapter 30

On the 16th of February, 1990, a Friday, Brenda delivered my son, Dwight Richard Parsons, into our lives. It was an easy delivery for Brenda, which was a good thing, as she had been fearful of having another difficult birth, similar to what she had endured back when April had been born. Again, Mama was there for the birth.

No one had said anything about Mama's relationship to this baby, but all of us could see that "Dwightee" was a very special new addition to the family, at least in Mama's eyes. 'Doted' would be too mild of a word to describe the way Mama felt and acted towards our new baby. She lavished him with her attention, and spared no expense in seeing to his care, including hiring another girl, in transition from foster care, to serve as Brenda's assistant in caring for April and Dwightee.

The new girl, Natalie, was eighteen years old, and very pretty, in a brassy sort of way. She reminded me a little of Bea in the way she always tried to show herself off to men in the most flattering ways. It was a little bit funny to observe the way she threw her shoulders back to puff out her chest, and sucked in her stomach, whenever an adult male came into any room she was in. The X's had a lot of fun imitating her mannerisms around me.

I thought Natalie was very sweet natured, and I tried to go out of my way to make her feel welcome. Of course, my wives all misinterpreted the reasons for my attentions, attributing it to some kind of a sexual interest I was supposed to have for her. Nothing could have been further from the truth. She was just a girl who enjoyed having men pay attention to her good looks. It made her happier knowing that she was being admired. I suspected that Joyce and Emily were both interested in Natalie, but I didn't tease them about their interest.

Eddie had set up that third monitor in my home office, and had managed to merge both signals together by using a new video card in one of my computers. It took me a month to be able to mentally integrate what I was seeing on the new screen, and even then, I needed to refer back to the other two screens with their separated feeds. I kept trading the grains, and only watching the metals and the Dollar.

On March 17th, a Saturday, Emily gave birth to our daughter, Carolyn Constance Parsons. This was another name chosen solely by Emily. Within a week, we all called the new baby either "C.C." or "Sissy", and Emily was the only one who ever referred to her as Carolyn. This too was a quick and easy labor, lasting less than two hours, and culminating in a birth after a single hard push. At least, that's what Emily told all of us. I thought she was simply trying to get one up on Brenda, but there is no doubt that it was over with very quickly.

April 9th, a Monday, Joyce delivered our daughter, Gwendolyn Rene Parsons, after spending nine hours in hard labor. After the easy time of it that Emily and Brenda had experienced, Joyce seemed a little bitter about her ordeal. This name was one that Joyce had decided on after looking through several baby naming books. The baby had such soft skin that I started calling her 'Silk', and the name caught on, after first being changed slightly to 'Silky'.

On April 26th, a Thursday, Rebecca Starr Parsons was born to Shirley and me. Shirley had an easier time of it this time too, managing to spend only three and a half hours in labor. It helped that Becky weighed in at six and a half pounds, and was only nineteen inches long. Shirley seemed very relieved that this baby wasn't already tall. We had discussed possible names for the baby, and, surprisingly, Shirley agreed to use one of the names I had suggested. I had proposed Ringo Starr, in case it was a boy, and Shirley liked the name Starr for a girl.

I was just happy and relieved that all of the children were born healthy, and that all my wives came through it without any problems. Twelve happy, healthy, children, that was more than enough for me. I was ready to close that chapter of my life down, looking forward to the raising and nurturing of all those little lives.

I was sitting at my desk at home, ruminating about all of my blessings, staring off into nothingness, when I happened to focus on the new monitor I had placed off to the side, away from my trading program monitor. Before, I'd had all three monitors lined up side by side, and it had been a little unsettling and confusing, trying to follow all three screens at once.

I'm not sure how long I'd been watching the integrated signal before I became consciously aware of doing so. It must have been several minutes though, because I started discerning a tradeable pattern between the Dollar and the grains. They had both taken off in opposite directions, and the metals had stayed steady. I called my floor trader at the CME in Chicago and started buying future Dollars. At the same time, I manually began selling each of the four grain contracts I was currently trading, trying to strike a dollar amount equivalent between the two types of trades.

As soon as I completed setting up my trades, I realized that I'd made an error, and called to set up new grain sales in forward contract months. Once these were completed, I began moving in and out of the current contracts for grains, ignoring the third screen except for glancing at it occasionally, to make certain that the general pattern hadn't changed between the Dollar's value, and the forward trading months in the grains.

I now had a box set up that would allow me to trade twice the number of current grain contracts as what I'd previously managed. I had a forward price cushion for the time value of the grain storage, and an inflation hedge with the Dollar purchase. By using the Dollar's position relative to the grains, I had eliminated a lot of the upside price risk in the grains. If the Dollar rallied, I'd have that profit to offset my grain losses, and if the Dollar continued to tank, I'd have big grain profits to offset that loss.

I didn't have very long to wait, as the Dollar quickly regained all of that day's earlier losses, finishing up slightly ahead of the previous day's close. Because that Dollar volatility had been caused by Middle East oil rumors, the grain prices ended up not really being affected too much. I closed out my Dollar trades, ending up with a large profit. I closed out the forward futures contracts as well, making another very slight profit, before reducing all my current contract trading positions to their normal levels.

It took me several hours to compute my end of day profits from my dollar and forward grain contract trades. As I'd hoped, the profit was very substantial. In two hours of trading on the divergence of the Dollar and the grains, I'd netted over seven hundred thousand dollars. I could see that this wasn't a trade I could initiate very often, but it was one that would prove very lucrative, over time. It wasn't yet as much as I had hoped for, but this single instance of a tradeable signal had more than paid me back for every cent I'd spent in research and development costs.

I ended my day with a grain profit on my normal trading program that was comparable to one and a half times my normal daily average. It took me several more hours of dissecting the trade confirmations to draw a rough comparison between what I would normally have made and what I did make. When I was finished, I found that I'd increased what my normal grain profit would have been by some seventy percent.

At dinner, I told Joyce and the X's about my trading day, and about the Dollar divergence, explaining how I'd been able to see the signal, and then successfully exploit it. Joyce followed my explanation easily, and Emily seemed to understand how significant this new trading possibility was.

Brenda and Shirley didn't seem to be paying attention to anything I was saying until I mentioned that I'd had almost a million dollar trading profit for the day. That got Brenda's attention right away. She asked me if I'd included her account in my trading. I told her that I had, that it was automatic to spread all of my trades as evenly as possible between the fourteen accounts I was then trading. She did the math quickly in her head, arriving at an approximate $75,000.00 profit for her account. I confirmed her figure for her, knowing that her account was actually the third largest one I was then trading, so that her true profit was probably closer to one hundred thousand dollars.

"How much money do I have in my account now?" Brenda was definitely interested in money, especially when it was her money.

"I think it's a little more than nine million dollars, but remember we just paid some pretty hefty taxes for last year's gains." Brenda looked shocked at me telling her that her account was worth that amount of money.

"How much of that is money I'm going to have to give the government?"

"I guess that depends on how we end up in December. At the rate we've been going, you'll probably owe about four million dollars, but you should have around fifteen million by then, so you'll end up with about eleven million, net for you." This was the part I loved to talk to Brenda about. To her, money equalled status and position. There were many levels of wealthy, and she aspired to all of them. All of them above where she currently was. Her greatest fear was her losing her money somehow, like her brother had.

"Is there a way I can not have to pay that money in taxes? Can I donate it instead?"

"You still have to pay taxes on adjusted gross income, Brenda. If you give away four million dollars, that reduces your gross taxable income, but it won't lower your taxes by anything like four million, more like a little less than one point eight million, counting State and Federal taxes."

"Can't we make my money tax exempt, like you did for the group homes?"

I smiled over at her. This was so typically Brenda. She didn't understand why a charitable, not for profit organization, should have a tax preference that she wasn't also entitled to. I didn't know any way to answer her that she would find comfortable, or even acceptable.

"Rich people have to pay a lot of taxes, Brenda. That's one of the burdens of being wealthy. The more taxes you pay, the more it's a sign of how wealthy you are becoming. This year, you'll easily be in the top one percent of individual taxpayers. That's quite a select group to be a part of."

"Are you sure, Kenny? I'm in the top one percent?" Brenda seemed pleased with this news.

"Probably in the top one half of one percent, Brenda. I doubt there are many other individuals, as young as you, who are paying the kind of taxes you'll be paying. If you go just by age, you're probably in the top one hundredth of one percent, probably even more than that, maybe as much as one in ten million. If I keep having enough time for my trading, and it keeps getting better, in a few years, you might be the top one in one hundred million."

Brenda was beaming her most radiant smile at me, right up until I got to the part about if I had enough time to continue with my trading. Always before, when we had spoken about the need for having a brain trust, it was presented in a way that made it seem like I wanted it so that I wouldn't need to work at the company as hard or as long as my father did. To her, my wanting to work less seemed selfish.

Brenda had always taken the position that having a brain trust wasn't worth her having to give up the access to me she had become used to having. For the first time, she began to realize what my not having the free time to continue with my grain trading could mean to her personal finances. She wasn't happy with the thought that I might have to stop growing her fortune. In that way she reminded me of Mama.