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Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Chapter XIV
It has always rankled in my mind that after I left Williamson & Brown's office the cream
was off the market. We ran smack into a long moneyless period; four mighty lean years.
There was not a penny to be made. As Billy Hen-riquez once said, "It was the kind of
market in which not even a skunk could make a scent."
It looked to me as though I was in Dutch with destiny. It might have been the plan of
Providence to chasten me, but really I had not been filled with such pride as called for a
fall. I had not committed any of those speculative sins which a trader must expiate on
the debtor side of the account. I was not guilty of a typical sucker play. What I had done,
or, rather, what I had left undone, was something for which I would have received praise
and not blame north of Forty-second Street. In Wall Street it was absurd and costly. But
by far the worst thing about it was the tendency it had to make a man a little less
inclined to permit himself human feelings in the ticker district.
I left Williamson's and tried other brokers' offices. In every one of them I lost money. It
served me right, because I was trying to force the market into giving me what it didn't
have to give to wit, opportunities for making money. I did not find any trouble in getting
credit, because those who knew me had faith in me. You can get an idea of how strong
their confidence was when I tell you that when I finally stopped trading on credit I owed
well over one million dollars.
The trouble was not that I had lost my grip but that during those four wretched years the
opportunities for making money simply didn't exist. Still I plugged along, trying to make
a stake and succeeding only in increasing my indebtedness. After I ceased trading on my
own hook because I wouldn't owe my friends any more money I made a living handling
accounts for people who believed I knew the game well enough to beat it even in a dull
market. For my services I received a percentage of the profits when there were any. That
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