VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
confidence not if you want them to remain members of the New York Stock Exchange.
Then also, the taxes have made all practices involving fictitious transactions much more
expensive than they used to be in the old times.
The dictionary definition of manipulation includes corners. Now, a corner might be the
result of manipulation or it might be the result of competitive buying, as, for instance,
the Northern Pacific corner on May 9, 1901, which certainly was not manipulation. The
Stutz corner was expensive to everybody concerned, both in money and in prestige. And
it was not a deliberately engineered corner, at that.
As a matter of fact very few of the great corners were profitable to the engineers of
them. Both Commodore Vander-bilt's Harlem corners paid big, but the old chap
deserved the millions he made out of a lot of short sports, crooked legislators and
aldermen who tried to double-cross him. On the other hand, Jay Gould lost in his
Northwestern corner. Deacon S. V. White made a million in his Lackawanna corner, but
Jim Keene dropped a million in the Hannibal & St. Joe deal. The financial success of a
corner of course depends upon the marketing of the accumulated holdings at higher than
cost, and the short interest has to be of some magnitude for that to happen easily.
I used to wonder why corners were so popular among the big operators of a half-century
ago. They were men of ability and experience, wide-awake and not prone to childlike
trust in the philanthropy of their fellow traders. Yet they used to get stung with an
astonishing frequency. A wise old broker told me that all the big operators of the '60's
and '70's had one ambition, and that was to work a corner. In many cases this was the
offspring of vanity; in others, of the desire for revenge. At all events, to be pointed out
as the man who had successfully cornered this or the other stock was in reality
recognition of brains, boldness and boodle. It gave the cornerer the right to be haughty.
He accepted the plaudits of his fellows as fully earned. It was more than the prospective
money profit that prompted the engineers of corners to do their damnedest. It was the
vanity complex asserting itself among cold-blooded operators.
Dog certainly ate dog in those days with relish and ease. I think I told you before that I
have managed to escape being squeezed more than once, not because of the possession
of a mysterious ticker-sense but because I can generally tell the moment the character of
the buying in the stock makes it imprudent for me to be short of it. This I do by
common-sense tests, which must have been tried in the old times also. Old Daniel Drew
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