VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
"But we're already below the legal limit," they howled
"Use them! That's what reserves are for!" And the banks obeyed and invaded the
reserves to the extent of about twenty million dollars. It saved the stock market. The
bank panic didn't come until the following week. He was a man, J. P. Morgan was. They
don't come much bigger.
That was the day I remember most vividly of all the days of my life as a stock operator.
It was the day when my winnings exceeded one million dollars. It marked the successful
ending of my first deliberately planned trading campaign. What I had foreseen had come
to pass. But more than all these things was this: a wild dream of mine had been realised.
I had been king for a day!
I'll explain, of course. After I had been in New York a couple of years I used to cudgel
my brains trying to determine the exact reason why I couldn't beat in a Stock Exchange
house in New York the game that I had beaten as a kid of fifteen in a bucket shop in
Boston. I knew that some day I would find out what was wrong and I would stop being
wrong. I would then have not alone the will to be right but the knowledge to insure my
being right. And that would mean power.
Please do not misunderstand me. It was not a deliberate dream of grandeur or a futile
desire born of overweening vanity. It was rather a sort of feeling that the same old stock
market that so baffled me in Fullerton's office and in Hoarding's would one day eat out
of my hand. I just felt that such a day would come. And it did October 24, 1907.
The reason why I say it is this: That morning a broker who had done a lot of business for
my brokers and knew that I had been plunging on the bear side rode down in the
company of one of the partners of the foremost banking house in the Street. My friend
told the banker how heavily I had been trading, for I certainly pushed my luck to the
limit. What is the use of being right unless you get all the good possible out of it?
Perhaps the broker exaggerated to make his story sound important. Perhaps I had more
of a following than I knew. Perhaps the banker knew far better than I how critical the
situation was. At all events, my friend said to me: "He listened with great interest to
what I told him you said the market was going to do when the real selling began, after
another push or two. When I got through he said he might have something for me to do
later in the day."
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