The monsters of money

Every Halloween, the same spooky creatures pop up: the vampire, the witch, and at least one person in an inflatable T-Rex costume who keeps knocking over the snack table. There are plenty of monsters in finance, too, and sometimes the resemblance is a little too close for comfort. So, with my vast financial expertise (i.e., vibes), I've paired each common Halloween costume with its money-world counterpart. Are you a witch? A werewolf? Elizabeth Holmes? Let's find out.

Vampire: The Wealth Management Advisor

By no means am I condemning the person responsible for turning your money into more money. On the contrary: wealth management advisors are masters of self-preservation, just like some coffin-dwelling creatures I know. Their careers span decades (maybe centuries), and their extremely long time horizon allows them to wait out bad market turn after bad market turn – then strike at the perfect moment.

Plus, they're great dressers. Wealth management advisors' style is reminiscent of Bela Lugosi's Dracula: excellent fits, perfect tailoring, and hair that'll stay firmly in place, no matter what turbulence the market may bring. Transylvanian passport not required.

Werewolf: The Tax Expert

If you glean anything from werewolf lore, it’s that none of us has actually seen one because they show up only under specific circumstances (and usually past our bedtimes). The werewolf shares many qualities with the tax expert, who, for most of the year, grinds behind the scenes without anybody noticing, before launching into beast mode as April arrives.

Like the full moon on a crisp autumn evening, tax season coaxes its experts out of 'business as usual,' sending them into a tizzy of emails, receipts, spreadsheets, and urgent questions concerning the whereabouts of your pay stubs, Anne, because you’re supposed to have kept them, you know this, why do you do this every year. Unprepared victims will face unbridled rage: their howl, their growl, and their determination to get everything done by the deadline. Watch as they attack and devour their prey (i.e., CRA forms), then disappear into the night once tax season is over. May you never cross paths with one outside of a scheduled meeting time.

Inflatable T-Rex: The Stock Bro

A relatively recent fixture on the costume circuit, the inflatable T-Rex is a supersized presence that commands attention with its alpha performance, whether you want to look or not. Look at those jaws! Those teeth! Those tiny arms! Who even invited them? Nobody knows – but alas, they're here, and they're already causing trouble. Stay very still, for this is Halloween’s answer to a day trader.

Fittingly, the inflatable T-Rex is full of hot air, just like all of the little baby stock bros who saw The Wolf of Wall Street and thought it was an instruction manual. What are they shouting at on the stock market floor? Who are they screaming at on their cell phones? Where do they find the time to talk business while also documenting their gym visits and protein intake? Don't ask them for the answers. My advice: run. If you’re bold enough to announce that you don’t even know how the stock market works, they will chase you down and force you to invest before “the market turns again” (what does that even mean?!).

Witch: The Options Trader

Perhaps there’s a little witch in all of us. But the practising kind will tell you it’s less about the vibe and more about the ritual, the discipline, and showing up every day. There are ingredients to source, ancient texts to decipher, and potions to concoct. Witchcraft isn't for the faint of heart – and neither is options trading.

Anybody can buy a stock, but the options trader speaks a strange language of strike prices, expiry dates, and Greeks like theta and vega. Their spellbook is full of occult-sounding recipes: the iron condor, the butterfly, the strangle. Get the measurements juuuuust right and they'll accomplish amazing things that look a lot like magic; get them wrong and things get toxic fast. Your laptop is your cauldron. Your phone, your broom. One does not simply become an options trader – that grimoire has to be earned.

Zombie: The Analyst

Zombies don’t get the respect they deserve. Where would we be without them? The Walking Dead would simply be a TV show about a bunch of people who haven’t bathed in years and don’t know how to leave Georgia. The Cranberries would have called their most political song something else. There'd be no Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, or Night of the Living Dead – the zombies would lose the entire 24 hours.

Just like the undead, analysts cannot rest. Where we sleep perchance to dream, they keep their eyes glued to their Bloomberg terminal, mapping market trends and stock prices, determining whether millennials will ever own property. (We won’t.) They exist on coffee, on memories of time gone by, on the hope of a better day tomorrow. Dare to interrupt them and they'll come for you – slowly, while staring down at their phones, but with enough momentum that you may find yourself cornered, discussing the trajectory of Nvidia stock.

Black Cat: The Portfolio Manager

Should you be fortunate enough to live with a black cat, you will understand that despite a pronounced lack of opposable thumbs, they are 1,000% in charge. Sleek, confident, ambitious, and entitled enough to scream at a closed door until they’re given Churu. Black cats are the only acceptable costume for the Type A set – the Halloweeners who know everything about everyone, and offered to host the party anyway.

That's also what makes an effective portfolio manager. They manage all the allocation, diversification, and liquidation – not to mention making buy/sell decisions on the fly. These precious investment mainstays possess catlike instincts and reflexes, and they have the healthy self-image to match. Can you ever fully understand them? Absolutely not, and that's the appeal.

Elizabeth Holmes: Elizabeth Holmes

I'm not deceiving you. Why would I deceive you? There's no reason for me to do that.