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Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
funny name for a man to have. The other man, the Shylock, was a notorious locker-up of
money. His name has also gone from me. But I remember he was tall and thin and pale.
In those days the cliques used to lock up money by borrowing it or, rather, by reducing
the amount available to Stock Exchange borrowers. They would borrow it and get a
certified check. They wouldn't actually take the money out and use it. Of course that was
rigging. It was a form of manipulation, I think."
I agree with the old chap. It was a phase of manipulation that we don't have nowadays.
I myself never spoke to any of the great stock manipulators that the Street still talks
about. I don't mean leaders; I mean manipulators. They were all before my time,
although when I first came to New York, James R. Keene, greatest of them all, was in
his prime. But I was a mere youngster then, exclusively concerned with duplicating, in a
reputable broker's office, the success I had enjoyed in the bucket shops of my native
city. And, then, too, at the time Keene was busy with the U. S. Steel stocks -his
manipulative masterpiece -I had no experience with manipulation, no real knowledge of
it or of its value or meaning, and, for that matter, no great need of such knowledge. If I
thought about it at all I suppose I must have regarded it as a well-dressed form of
thimble-rigging, of which the lowbrow form was such tricks as had been tried on me in
the bucket shops. Such talk as I since have heard on the subject has consisted in great
part of surmises and suspicions; of guesses rather than intelligent analyses.
More than one man who knew him well has told me that Keene was the boldest and
most brilliant operator that ever worked in Wall Street. That is saying a great deal, for
there have been some great traders. Their names are now all but forgotten, but
nevertheless they were kings in their day for a day! They were pulled up out of obscurity
into the sunlight of financial fame by the ticker tape and the little paper ribbon didn't
prove strong enough to keep them suspended there long enough for them to become
historical fixtures. At all events Keene was by all odds the best manipulator of his day
and it was a long and exciting day.
He capitalized his knowledge of the game, his experience as an operator and his talents
when he sold his services to the Havemeyer brothers, who wanted him to develop a
market for the Sugar stocks. He was broke at the time or he would have continued to
trade on his own hook; and he was some plunger! He was successful with Sugar; made
the shares trading favourites, and that made them easily vendible. After that, he was
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