The Amazing Spiderman is going ex. Spiderman is not his real name. He is a private client stockbroker who a good few years ago made a series of uncannily accurate calls about companies that went on to issue profit warnings.
“Spider sense,” he would say when asked how he knew, referring to the superhero’s ability to sense danger. The name stuck, even when later the calls started to go awry.
In the same way that shares go ex-dividend, once the qualification date for payout has passed, Spidey says he is trading “ex-the missus”. The Spidermans, it seems, are no longer an item.
There is a lot of it about. So much so that one fund manager is out trying to raise £5 million to bankroll the rising number of big-money divorces. The Novitas Divorce Litigation fund — run by the former AllianceBernstein money manager Jason Reeve — lends up to £250,000 to cover upfront legal costs for divorcing spouses short of cash but in line for thumping settlements. Investors are on a promise of an 8 per cent divvy.
Maybe the recession is to blame, sighs another soon-to-be-single broker in his mid-40s, genuinely upset and trying for all he is worth not to sound bitter.
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Maybe a certain comfortable lifestyle came to be expected on the home front, he ventures, a lifestyle these filthy markets simply refuse to yield. Now Spiderman and his ilk can no longer meet consensus forecasts back home, the investment rationale in some cases looks a little iffy.
If that sounds misogynistic, it is. This is the City, where some are quick to blame gold-digging spouses for matrimonial discord. Plus, at the risk of sounding offensive, it does happen.
Chew the fat with any slick City operator worth his percentage and he tells of a certain type of client, if not exactly forming an orderly queue, then regular enough business. The trophy wife who married her banker or broker sugar daddy in her mid-twenties, served out her five to ten and now wants to spread her wings.
Most times hubby, a decade or two her senior, is a pragmatist. He walked into the deal eyes wide open and is happy to sign off on a golden goodbye. The more so were rugrats involved.
Spend ten minutes in the City and it is plain as a market maker’s paunch that to blame marital strife on rapacious wives is as risible as the idea that Facebook floated at the right price.
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Much more culpable is a culture that insists EC2 is another country, that things are different here. The rules that bind elsewhere do not apply. Too much money, too much testosterone, too much booze. Hubris and a rugby club omerta that dictates what goes on on tour, stays on tour.
That “SEX” is writ as large through the City as “BLACKPOOL” through rock is a truism. Traders marry porn stars. Married brokers keep mistresses in off-balance sheet pieds-a-terre or visit City knocking shops at lunchtime. Champagne matinees at gentlemen’s clubs develop into something more. Analysts keep spreadsheets of their outgoings on prostitutes. By no means all of them, but enough.
Spidey says he will soon be short cash, but long happiness. Spidey’s met an estate agent-turned-exotic dancer, 20 years his junior. She likes me, he says, and doesn’t want paying.
Even he sounds amazed.