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Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Chapter XII
Not long after I closed my July cotton deal more successfully than I had expected I
received by mail a request for an interview. The letter was signed by Percy Thomas. Of
course I immediately answered that I'd be glad to see him at my office at any time he
cared to call. The next day he came.
I had long admired him. His name was a household word wherever men took an interest
in growing or buying or selling cotton. In Europe as well as all over this country people
quoted Percy Thomas' opinions to me. I remember once at a Swiss resort talking to a
Cairo banker who was interested in cotton growing in Egypt in association with the late
Sir Ernest Cassel. When he heard I was from New York he immediately asked me about
Percy Thomas, whose market reports he received and read with unfailing regularity.
Thomas, I always thought, went about his business scientifically. He was a true
speculator, a thinker with the vision of a dreamer and the courage of a fighting man an
unusually well-informed man, who knew both the theory and the practice of trading in
cotton. He loved to hear and to express ideas and theories and abstractions, and at the
same time there was mighty little about the practical side of the cotton market or the
psychology of cotton traders that he did not know, for he had been trading for years and
had made and lost vast sums.
After the failure of his old Stock Exchange firm of Sheldon & Thomas he went it alone.
Inside of two years he came back, almost spectacularly. I remember reading in the Sun
that the first thing he did when he got on his feet financially was to pay off his old
creditors in full, and the next was to hire an expert to study and determine for him how
he had best invest a million dollars. This expert examined the properties and analysed
the reports of several companies and then recommended the purchase of Delaware &
Hudson stock.
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