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Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Chapter XIX
I do not know when or by whom the word "manipulation" was first used in connection
with what really are no more than common merchandising processes applied to the sale
in bulk of securities on the Stock Exchange. Rigging the market to facilitate cheap
purchases of a stock which it is desired to accumulate is also manipulation. But it is
different. It may not be necessary to stoop to illegal practices, but it would be difficult to
avoid doing what some would think illegitimate. How are you going to buy a big block
of a stock in a bull market without putting up the price on yourself? That would be the
problem. How can it be solved? It depends upon so many things that you can't give a
general solution unless you say: possibly by means of very adroit manipulation. For
instance? Well, it would depend upon conditions. You can't give any closer answer than
that.
I am profoundly interested in all phases of my business, and of course I learn from the
experience of others as well as from my own. But it is very difficult to learn how to
manipulate stocks to-day from such yarns as are told of an afternoon in the brokers'
offices after the close. Most of the tricks, devices and expedients of bygone days are
obsolete and futile; or illegal and impracticable. Stock Exchange rules and conditions
have changed, and the story even the accurately detailed story of what Daniel Drew or
Jacob Little or Jay Gould could do fifty or seventy-five years ago is scarcely worth
listening to. The manipulator to-day has no more need to consider what they did and
how they did it than a cadet at West Point need study archery as practiced by the
ancients in order to increase his working knowledge of ballistics.
On the other hand there is profit in studying the human factors the ease with which
human beings believe what it pleases them to believe; and how they allow themselves -
indeed, urge themselves -to be influenced by their cupidity or by the dollar-cost of the
average man's carelessness. Fear and hope remain the same; therefore the study of the
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