Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Lefèvre Edwin

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СКАЧАТЬ them. I’d walk in and plank down my margin, but they’d look at it without making a move to grab it. They’d tell me there was nothing doing. That was the time they got to calling me the Boy Plunger. I had to be changing brokers all the time, going from one bucket shop to another. It got so that I had to give a fictitious name. I’d begin light, only fifteen or twenty shares. At times, when they got suspicious, I’d lose on purpose at first and then sting them proper. Of course after a little while they’d find me too expensive and they’d tell me to take myself and my business elsewhere and not interfere with the owners’ dividends.

      Once, when the big concern I’d been trading with for months shut down on me I made up my mind to take a little more of their money away from them. That bucket shop had branches all over the city, in hotel lobbies, and in near-by towns. I went to one of the hotel branches and asked the manager a few questions and finally got to trading. But as soon as I played an active stock my especial way he began to get messages from the head office asking who it was that was operating. The manager told me what they asked him and I told him my name was Edward Robinson, of Cambridge. He telephoned the glad news to the big chief. But the other end wanted to know what I looked like. When the manager told me that I said to him, “Tell him I am a short fat man with dark hair and a bushy beard!” But he described me instead, and then he listened and his face got red and he hung up and told me to beat it.

      “What did they say to you?” I asked him politely.

      “They said, ‘You blankety-blank fool, didn’t we tell you to take no business from Larry Livingston? And you deliberately let him trim us out of $700!’ ” He didn’t say what else they told him.

      I tried the other branches one after another, but they all got to know me, and my money wasn’t any good in any of their offices. I couldn’t even go in to look at the quotations without some of the clerks making cracks at me. I tried to get them to let me trade at long intervals by dividing my visits among them all. But that didn’t work.

      Finally there was only one left to me and that was the biggest and richest of all – the Cosmopolitan Stock Brokerage Company.

      The Cosmopolitan was rated as A-1 and did an enormous business. It had branches in every manufacturing town in New England. They took my trading all right, and I bought and sold stocks and made and lost money for months, but in the end it happened with them as usual. They didn’t refuse my business point-blank, as the small concerns had. Oh, not because it wasn’t sportsmanship, but because they knew it would give them a black eye to publish the news that they wouldn’t take a fellow’s business just because that fellow happened to make a little money. But they did the next worse thing – that is, they made me put up a three-point margin and compelled me to pay a premium at first of a half point, then a point, and finally, a point and a half. Some handicap, that! How? Easy! Suppose Steel was selling at 90 and you bought it. Your ticket read, normally: “Bot ten Steel at 90

.” If you put up a point margin it meant that if it broke 89¼ you were wiped out automatically. In a bucket shop the customer is not importuned for more margin or put to the painful necessity of telling his broker to sell for anything he can get.

      But when the Cosmopolitan tacked on that premium they were hitting below the belt. It meant that if the price was 90 when I bought, instead of making my ticket: “Bot Steel at 90

,” it read: “Bot Steel at 91.” Why, that stock could advance a point and a quarter after I bought it and I’d still be losing money if I closed the trade. And by also insisting that I put up a three-point margin at the very start they reduced my trading capacity by two thirds. Still, that was the only bucket shop that would take my business at all, and I had to accept their terms or quit trading.

      Of course I had my ups and downs, but was a winner on balance. However, the Cosmopolitan people were not satisfied with the awful handicap they had tacked on me, which should have been enough to beat anybody. They tried to double-cross me. They didn’t get me. I escaped because of one of my hunches.

      The Cosmopolitan, as I said, was my last resort. It was the richest bucket shop in New England, and as a rule they put no limit on a trade. I think I was the heaviest individual trader they had – that is, of the steady, every-day customers. They had a fine office and the largest and completest quotation board I have ever seen anywhere. It ran along the whole length of the big room and every imaginable thing was quoted. I mean stocks dealt in on the New York and Boston Stock Exchanges, cotton, wheat, provisions, metals – everything that was bought and sold in New York, Chicago, Boston and Liverpool.

      You know how they traded in bucket shops. You gave your money to a clerk and told him what you wished to buy or sell. He looked at the tape or the quotation board and took the price from there – the last one, of course. He also put down the time on the ticket so that it almost read like a regular broker’s report – that is, that they had bought or sold for you so many shares of such a stock at such a price at such a time on such a day and how much money they received from you. When you wished to close your trade you went to the clerk – the same or another, it depended on the shop – and you told him. He took the last price or if the stock had not been active he waited for the next quotation that came out on the tape. He wrote that price and the time on your ticket, O.K.’d it and gave it back to you, and then you went to the cashier and got whatever cash it called for. Of course, when the market went against you and the price went beyond the limit set by your margin, your trade automatically closed itself and your ticket became one more scrap of paper.

      In the humbler bucket shops, where people were allowed to trade in as little as five shares, the tickets were little slips – different colors for buying and selling – and at times, as for instance in boiling bull markets, the shops would be hard hit because all the customers were bulls and happened to be right. Then the bucket shop would deduct both buying and selling commissions and if you bought a stock at 20 the ticket would read 20¼. You thus had only ¾ of a point’s run for your money.

      But the Cosmopolitan was the finest in New England. It had thousands of patrons and I really think I was the only man they were afraid of. Neither the killing premium nor the three-point margin they made me put up reduced my trading much. I kept on buying and selling as much as they’d let me. I sometimes had a line of 5000 shares.

      Well, on the day the thing happened that I am going to tell you, I was short thirty-five hundred shares of Sugar. I had seven big pink tickets for five hundred shares each. The Cosmopolitan used big slips with a blank space on them where they could write down additional margin. Of course, the bucket shops never ask for more margin. The thinner the shoestring the better for them, for their profit lies in your being wiped. In the smaller shops if you wanted to margin your trade still further they’d make out a new ticket, so they could charge you the buying commission and only give you a run of ¾ of a point on each point’s decline, for they figured the selling commission also exactly as if it were a new trade.

      Well, this day I remember I had up over $10,000 in margins.

      I was only twenty when I first accumulated ten thousand dollars in cash. And you ought to have heard my mother. You’d have thought that ten thousand dollars in cash was more than anybody carried around except old John D., and she used to tell me to be satisfied and go into some regular business. I had a hard time convincing her that I was not gambling, but making money by figuring. But all she could see was that ten thousand dollars was a lot of money and all I could see was more margin.

      I had put out my 3500 shares of Sugar at 105¼. There was another fellow in the room, Henry Williams, who was short 2500 shares. I used to sit by the ticker and call out the quotations for the board boy. The price behaved as I thought it would. It promptly went down a couple of points and paused a little to get its breath before taking another dip. The general market was pretty soft and everything looked promising. Then all of a sudden I didn’t СКАЧАТЬ