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Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Chapter XI
And now I'll get back to October, 1907. I bought a yacht and made all preparations to
leave New York for a cruise in Southern waters. I am really daffy about fishing and this
was the time when I was going to fish
to my heart's content from my own yacht, going wherever I wished whenever I felt like
it. Everything was ready. I had made a killing in stocks, but at the last moment corn held
me back.
I must explain that before the money panic which gave me ray first million I had been
trading in grain at Chicago. I was short ten million bushels of wheat and ten million
bushels of corn. I had studied the grain markets for a long time and was as bearish on
corn and wheat as I had been on stocks.
Well, they both started down, but while wheat kept on de-dining the biggest of all the
Chicago operators I'll call him Stratton took it into his head to run a corner in corn. After
I cleaned up in stocks and was ready to go South on my yacht I found that wheat showed
me a handsome profit, but in corn Stratton had run up the price and I had quite a loss.
I knew there was much more corn in the country than the price indicated. The law of
demand and supply worked as always. But the demand came chiefly from Stratton and
the supply was not coming at all, because there was an acute congestion in the
movement of corn. I remember that I used to pray for a cold spell that would freeze the
impassable roads and enable the farmers to bring their corn into the market. But no such
luck.
There I was, waiting to go on my joyously planned fishing trip and that loss in corn
holding me back. I couldn't go away with the market as it was. Of course Stratton kept
pretty close tabs on the short interest. He knew he had me, and I knew it quite as well as
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