Once in a while Karo Hämäläinen receives a phone call which begins with the caller asking whether this is the journalist who writes about the stock market “because there is also a novelist of the same name.” Mr Hämäläinen replies that the call has reached the right person, the same reply he gives to callers to the novelist who mention his investment specialist namesake.

Since childhood, Hämäläinen has been interested in both numbers and letters. His favourite childhood game was playing shop: his grandmother and he would buy a pack of six small cartons of raisins, and he would sell the individual cartons to his grandmother. He bought in bulk and sold separately, and sometimes even made a profit. While still in primary school he speculated in arbitrage when he noticed that a flea market in Mikkeli was selling Donald Duck comics for less than the second-hand bookshop would buy them for. He also received dividends from his investment: he was able to read the comic books in the evening before selling them the next day.

As a secondary school student, Hämäläinen began to train himself as a writer in the typical way: by reading anything he could get his hands on. The direct continuation of this single-minded project was to study literature at the University of Helsinki.

In his current work Hämäläinen combines his enthusiasm for letters and numbers. The former is satisfied through his work as a novelist and editor-in-chief of the literary magazine Parnasso. His interest in numbers is channelled into following and writing about the stock market. In his new novel, Yksin, to be released this autumn, numbers feature to an exceptionally large degree: in the fictional autobiography of Paavo Nurmi, the prose is interspersed with lap times and world records, as it is with the stock market gains of Nurmi’s later business career.