The best way to tell what a person is really like is to see them under pressure. Where are the cracks in their foundation? Are they strong and skilled enough to cut through the noise? This was always one of the main appeals of a character like Harper — her ability to execute a killer trade in a moral gray area while also being prone to the panic attacks that kept her from graduating from college. Three seasons in, the stakes are impossibly high.
Who are our characters when things fall apart? “Smoke and Mirrors” is a stress test for all our favorite little traders. The power has returned after a brief outage, but Lumi is trading below the price point Pierpoint promised. The power outage at the exact instant of the IPO has caused pandemonium, with people unsure if they’ve actually purchased stock or if the IPO has happened at all.
Harper capitalizes on the chaos. FutureDawn had invested heavily in Lumi and Anna, the saintly founder of FutureDawn, is panicking about having to answer to her board of directors. Harper takes the opportunity to cross-talk with Petra, Anna’s disgruntled second in command, and pitch her idea for FutureDawn to hedge their Lumi exposure by buying natural gas futures and shorting the Great British Pound.
This is anathema to FutureDawn’s status as an ethical fund, but Petra doesn’t care. She’s tired of her investments being tied to Anna’s dogma. Harper exploits her knowledge of Pierpoint’s inner workings to get Petra an ultra-competiti.