Intelligent, yet emotionally broken and poor WWI veteran is laughed out of the room when he applies jobs at large banks during the 1920s boom, until he finds a mentor in the head of a near-bankrupt bank who gives him a job and helps him hone his trading skills before the Crash of ?29, when the hero executes a series of very complex trades, designed to take down each of the banks which underestimated him, one by one.