VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
most sensational failures in years. I forget how many millions. The firm was wound up
and Thomas went to work alone. He devoted himself exclusively to cotton and it was not
long before he was on his feet again. He paid off his creditors in full with interest debts
he was not legally obliged to discharge and withal had a million dollars left for himself.
His comeback in the cotton market was in its way as remarkable as Deacon S. V.
White's famous stock-market exploit of paying off one million dollars in one year.
Thomas' pluck and brains made me admire him immensely.
Everybody in Palm Beach was talking about the collapse of Thomas' deal in March
cotton. You know how the talk goes and grows; the amount of misinformation and
exaggeration and improvements that you hear. Why, I've seen a rumor about myself
grow so that the fellow who started it did not recognise it when it came back to him in
less than twenty-four hours, swollen with new and picturesque details.
The news of Percy Thomas' latest misadventure turned my mind from the fishing to the
cotton market. I got files of the trade papers and read them to get a line on conditions.
When I got back to New York I gave myself up to studying the market. Everybody was
bearish and everybody was selling July cotton. You know how people are. I suppose it is
the contagion of example that makes a man do something because everybody around
him is doing the same thing. Perhaps it is some phase or variety of the herd instinct. In
any case it was, in the opinion of hundreds of traders, the wise and proper thing to sell
July cotton and so safe too! You couldn't call that general selling reckless; the word is
too conservative. The traders simply saw one side to the market and a great big profit.
They certainly expected a collapse in prices.
I saw all this, of course, and it struck me that the chaps who were short didn't have a
terrible lot of time to cover in. The more I studied the situation the clearer I saw this,
until I finally decided to buy July cotton. I went to work and quickly bought one
hundred thousand bales. I experienced no trouble in getting it because it came from so
many sellers. It seemed to me that I could have offered a reward of one million dollars
for the capture, dead or alive, of a single trader who was not selling July cotton and
nobody would have claimed it.
I should say this was in the latter part of May. I kept buying more and they kept on
selling it to me until I had picked up all the floating contracts and I had one hundred and
twenty thousand bales. A couple of days after I had bought the last of it it began to go
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