VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
There I was, with more than nine-tenths of my stake, as Jim Fisk used to say, gone
where the woodbine twineth up the spout. I had been a millionaire rather less than a
year. My millions I had made by using brains, helped by luck. I had lost them by
reversing the process. I sold my two yachts and was decidedly less extravagant in my
manner of living.
But that one blow wasn't enough. Luck was against me. I ran up first against illness and
then against the urgent need of two hundred thousand dollars in cash. A few months
before that sum would have been nothing at all; but now it meant almost the entire
remnant of my fleet-winged fortune. I had to supply the money and the question was:
Where could I get it? I didn't want to take it out of the balance I kept at my brokers'
because if I did I wouldn't have much of a margin left for my own trading; and I needed
trading facilities more than ever if I was to win back my millions quickly. There was
only one alternative that I could see, and that was to take it out of the stock market!
Just think of it! If you know much about the average customer of the average
commission house you will agree with me that the hope of making the stock market pay
your bill is one of the most prolific sources of loss in Wall Street. You will chip out all
you have if you adhere to your determination.
Why, in Harding's office one winter a little bunch of high flyers spent thirty or forty
thousand dollars for an overcoat and not one of them lived to wear it. It so happened that
a prominent floor trader who since has become world-famous as one of the dollar-a-year
men came down to the Exchange wearing a fur overcoat lined with sea otter. In those
days, before furs went up sky high, that coat was valued at only ten thousand dollars.
Well, one of the chaps in Harding's office, Bob Keown, decided to get a coat lined with
Russian sable. He priced one uptown. The cost was about the same, ten thousand dollars.
"That's the devil of a lot of money," objected one of the fellows.
"Oh, fair! Fair!" admitted Bob Keown amiably. "About a week's wages unless you guys
promise to present it to me as a slight but sincere token of the esteem in which you hold
the nicest man in the office. Do I hear the presentation speech? No? Very well. I shall let
the stock market buy it for me!"
"Why do you want a sable coat?" asked Ed Harding.
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