VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
thousand bags. I don't like to talk about my operations in figures because sometimes
they sound rather formidable and people might think I was boasting. As a matter of fact
I trade in accordance to my means and always leave myself an ample margin of safety.
In this instance I was conservative enough. The reason I bought options so freely was
because I couldn't see how I could lose. Conditions were in my favour. I had been made
to wait a year, but now I was going to be paid both for my waiting and for being right. I
could see the profit coming fast. There wasn't any cleverness about it. It was simply that
I wasn't blind.
Coming sure and fast, that profit of millions! But it never reached me. No; it wasn't sidetracked
by a sudden change in conditions. The market did not experience an abrupt
reversal of form. Coffee did not pour into the country. What happened? The
unexpectable! What had never happened in anybody's experience; what I therefore had
no reason to guard against. I added a new one to the long list of hazards of speculation
that I must always keep before me. It was simply that the fellows who had sold me the
coffee, the shorts, knew what was in store for them, and in their efforts to squirm out of
the position into which they had sold themselves, devised a new way of welshing. They
rushed to Washington for help, and got it.
Perhaps you remember that the Government had evolved various plans for preventing
further profiteering in necessities. You know how most of them worked. Well, the
philanthropic coffee shorts appeared before the Price Fixing Committee of the War
Industries Board I think that was the official designation and made a patriotic appeal to
that body to protect the American breakfaster. They asserted that a professional
speculator, one Lawrence Livingston, had cornered, or was about to corner, coffee. If his
speculative plans were not brought to naught he would take advantage of the conditions
created by the war and the American people would be forced to pay exorbitant prices for
their daily coffee. It was unthinkable to the patriots who had sold me cargoes of coffee
they couldn't find ships for, that one hundred millions of Americans, more or less,
should pay tribute to conscienceless speculators. They represented the coffee trade, not
the coffee gamblers, and they were willing to help the Government curb profiteering
actual or prospective.
Now I have a horror of whiners and I do not mean to intimate that the Price Fixing
Committee was not doing its honest best to curb profiteering and wastefulness. But that
need not stop me from expressing the opinion that the committee could not have gone
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