Ethan Sullivan has spent two years turning impossible predictions into millions. Every trade is a winner. Every risk pays off. His friends think he’s a genius. Wall Street thinks he’s a legend.

The source of Ethan’s success is a secret he would kill to protect.

But when his flawless streak begins to unravel, Ethan becomes consumed by the need to regain his edge. As his fortune crumbles and reality grows increasingly strange, he finds himself chasing one final prediction—no matter the cost.

As always, I’ve created a little playlist of songs I listened to while writing the story. You can find the playlist here.

I think Dream Broker would be ideal for readers who invest in the stock market, especially day traders and other active investors. Fans of financial thrillers and speculative fiction would also enjoy this story, especially if they like psychological horror stories that deal with unstable realities, obsession, moral corruption, dream imagery and uncanny experiences.

***THE FOLLOWING CONTAINS SPOILERS. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK***

I got the idea for the story from my boyfriend. He had been having a recurring dream where he would meet Warren Buffett at his house. They would talk like old friends and have long, laid-back conversations about stocks and the financial markets. The dreams were really vivid and compelling. He told me about this recurring dream and encouraged me to write a story based on it. Together we came up with a rough plot for the story, which I later refined as I wrote it.

Something that has always struck me was how making money on the stock market is, to extent, like gambling. It almost feels a bit unnatural and too easy, like you are going against the natural order of things to make absurd amounts of money by just clicking a few buttons. Should it be so easy to make money, and is it really that easy to make money? It is of course a valid way of making money, but there is some element of luck involved and it is notoriously difficult to perfectly time the market and know exactly which stocks will be the most profitable. The number 1 rule of Wall Street – The Fugazi Principle – comes to mind 😉

Many people have dedicated their lives to finding alpha (a strategy that beats the broader market), but most ultimately end up falling short of that elusive ideal. The world is full of cocky gurus who claim that they know which stocks to buy and when/how to buy them (especially if you buy their course or subscribe to their newsletter), but few really have the results to back it up.

In addition, I have always been really intrigued by the idea of how making lots of money in the stock market can influence a person’s ego and cultivate hubris that can easily lead to ruin. I guess for many people it is tempting to start to attribute success in the market to being smarter, more skilled and special. Plus, if it was so “easy” to hit a home run the first time, why not continue, but with even more money? We’ve seen people fall into this trap time and again – think the Gamestop phenomenon that had people throw away their life savings because of hype and the allure of making every increasing returns.

“Dream Broker” was initially titled “The Mentor” and in the very first draft the philanthropist billionaire character was actually Warren Buffett. But I later changed his name and backstory to a fictional character because it felt kind of wrong to use a real person as a character in my story. However, some of the descriptions of Langford’s home are based on Buffett’s actual home in Omaha.

Ethan’s character is sort of a composite of people I have observed (I’ve met a lot of people who trade stocks for a living). He is also, to some extent, inspired by American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman.

I liked the idea of making Ethan intentionally step into the dream and not just have it randomly. Long ago, I had a friend who was really into lucid dreaming and shared a book about it with me. I took some inspiration from him and also found the following two webpages really helpful in creating and describing Ethan’s lucid dreaming practice:

• https://www.reddit.com/r/LucidDreaming/comments/p6i6qp/how_to_lucid_dream_tonight/
• https://www.calm.com/blog/how-to-lucid-dream

***END OF SPOILERS***

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Cheers for now!

MK