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hundreds of prosperous Wall Street men. My winnings were not
quite enough to offset both my losses and my living expenses.
I didn't keep on trading the way I did through
stubbornness. I simply wasn't able to state my own problem to
myself, and, of course, it was utterly hopeless to try to solve
it. I harp on this topic so much to show what I had to go
through before I got to where I could really make money. My old
shotgun and BB shot could not do the work of a high-power
repeating rifle against big game.
Early that fall I not only was cleaned out again but I was
so sick of the game I could no longer beat that I decided to
leave New York and try something else some other place. I had
been trading since my fourteenth year. I had made my first
thousand dollars when I was a kid of fifteen, and my first ten
thousand before I was twenty-one. I had made and lost a
ten-thousand-dollar stake more than once. In New York I had made
thousands and lost them. I got up to fifty thousand dollars and
two days later that went. I had no other business and knew no
other game. After several years I was back where I began. No
worse, for I had acquired habits and a style of living that
required money; though that part didn't bother me as much as
being wrong so consistently.
CHAPTER IV
WELL, I went home. But the moment I was back I knew that I
had but one mission in life and that was to get a stake and go
back to Wall Street. That was the only place in the country
where I could trade heavily. Some day, when my game was all
right, I'd need such a place. When a man is right he wants to
get all that is coming to him for being right.
I didn't have much hope, but, of course, I tried to get
into the bucket shops again. There were fewer of them and some
of them were run by strangers. Those who remembered me wouldn't
give me a chance to show them whether I had gone back as a
trader or not. I told them the truth, that I had lost in New
York whatever I had made at home; that I didn't know as much as
I used to think I did; and that there was no reason why it
should not now be good business for them to let me trade with
them. But they wouldn't. And the new places were unreliable.
Their owners thought twenty shares was as much as a gentleman
ought to buy if he had any reason to suspect he was going to
guess right.
I needed the money and the bigger shops were taking in
plenty of it from their regular customers. I got a friend of
mine to go into a certain office and trade. I just sauntered in
to look them over. I again tried to coax the order clerk to ac-
cept a small order, even if it was only fifty shares. Of course
he said no. I had rigged up a code with this friend so that he
would buy or sell when and what I told him. But that only made
me chicken feed. Then the office began to grumble about taking
my friend's orders. Finally one day he tried to sell a hundred
St. Paul and they shut down on him.
We learned afterward that one of the customers saw us
talking together outside and went in and told the office, and
when my friend went up to the order clerk to sell that hundred
St. Paul the guy said
"We're not taking any selling orders in St. Paul, not from
you."
"Why, what's the matter, Joe?" asked my friend.
"Nothing doing, that's all," answered Joe.
"Isn't that money any good? Look it over. It's all there."
And my friend passed over the hundred -- my hundred in tens. He
tried to look indignant and I was looking unconcerned; but most
of the other customers were getting close to the combatants, as
they always did when there was loud talking or the slightest
semblance of a scrap between the shop and any customer. They
wanted to get a line on the merits of the case in order to get a
line on the solvency of the concern.
The clerk, Joe, who was a sort of assistant manager, came
out from behind his cage, walked up to my friend, looked at him
and then looked at me.
"It's funny," he said slowly"it's damned funny that you
never do a single thing here when your friend Livermore isn't
around. You just sit and look at the board by the hour. Never a
peep. But after he comes in you get busy all of a sudden. Maybe
you are acting for yourself; but not in this office any more. We
don't fall for Livermore tipping you off."
Well, that stopped my board money. But I had made a few
hundred more than I had spent and I wondered how I could use
them, for the need of making enough money to go back to New York
with was more urgent than ever. I felt that I would do better
the next time. I had had time to think calmly of some of my
foolish plays; and then, one can see the whole better when one
sees it from a little distance. The immediate problem was to
make the new stake.
One day I was in a hotel lobby, talking to some fellows I
knew, who were pretty steady traders. Everybody was talking
stock market. I made the remark that nobody could beat the game
on account of the rotten execution he got from his brokers,
especially when he traded at the market, as I did.
A fellow piped up and asked me what particular brokers I
meant.
I said, "The best in the land," and he asked who might they
be. I could see he wasn't going to believe I ever dealt with
first-class houses.
But I said, "I mean; any member of the New York Stock
Exchange. It isn't that they are crooked or careless, but when a
man gives an order to buy at the market he never knows what that
stock is going to cost him until he gets a report from the
brokers. There are more moves of one or two points than of ten
or fifteen. But the outside trader can't catch the small rises
or drops because of the execution. I'd rather trade in a bucket
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