VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
up. Once it started the market was kind enough to keep on doing very well indeed -that
is, it went up from forty to fifty points a day.
One Saturday this was about ten days after I began operations the price began to creep
up. I did not know whether there was any more July cotton for sale. It was up to me to
find out, so I waited until the last ten minutes. At that time, I knew, it was usual for
those fellows to be short and if the market closed up for the day they would be safely
hooked. So I sent in four different orders to buy five thousand bales each, at the market,
at the same time. That ran the price up thirty points and the shorts were doing their best
to wriggle away. The market closed at the top. All I did, remember, was to buy that last
twenty thousand bales.
The next day was Sunday. But on Monday, Liverpool was due to open up twenty points
to be on a parity with the advance in New York. Instead, it came fifty points higher. That
meant that Liverpool had exceeded our advance by 100 per cent. I had nothing to do
with the rise in that market. This showed me that my deductions had been sound and that
I was trading along the line of least resistance. At the same time I was not losing sight of
the fact that I had a whopping big line to dispose of. A market may advance sharply or
rise gradually and yet not possess the power to absorb more than a certain amount of
selling.
Of course the Liverpool cables made our own market wild. But I noticed the higher it
went the scarcer July cotton seemed to be. I wasn't letting go any of mine. Altogether
that Monday was an exciting and not very cheerful day for the bears; but for all that, I
could detect no signs of an impending bear panic; no beginnings of a blind stampede to
cover. And I had one hundred and forty thousand bales for which I must find a market.
On Tuesday morning as I was walking to my office I met a friend at the entrance of the
building.
"That was quite a story in the World this morning," he said with a smile.
"What story?" I asked.
"What? Do you mean to tell me you haven't seen it?"
"I never see the World," I said. "What is the story?"
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