VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
that is, to lose money. And I am only right when I make money. That is speculating.
They were having some pretty lively times those days and the market was very active.
That always cheers up a fellow. I felt at home right away. There was the old familiar
quotation board in front of me, talking a language that I had learned before I was fifteen
years old. There was a boy doing exactly the same thing I used to do in the first office I
ever worked in. There were the customers same old bunch looking at the board or
standing by the ticket calling out the prices and talking about the market. The machinery
was to all appearances the same machinery that I was used to. The atmosphere was the
atmosphere I had breathed since I had made my first stock-market money $3.12 in
Burlington. The same kind of ticker and the same kind of traders, therefore the same
kind of game. And remember, I was only twenty-two. I suppose I thought I knew the
game from A to Z. Why shouldn't I?
I watched the board and saw something that looked good to me. It was behaving right. I
bought a hundred at 84. I got out at 85 in less than a half hour. Then I saw something
else I liked, and I did the same thing; took three-quarters of a point net within a very
short time. I began well, didn't I?
Now mark this: On that, my first day as a customer of a reputable Stock Exchange
house, and only two hours of it at that, I traded in eleven hundred shares of stock,
jumping in and out. And the net result of the day's operations was that I lost exactly
eleven hundred dollars. That is to say, on my first attempt, nearly one-half of my stake
went up the flue. And remember, some of the trades showed me a profit. But I quit
eleven hundred dollars minus for the day.
It didn't worry me, because I couldn't see where there was anything wrong with me. My
moves, also, were right enough, and if I had been trading in the old Cosmopolitan shop
I'd have broken better than even. That the machine wasn't as it ought to be, my eleven
hundred vanished dollars plainly told me. But as long as the machinist was all right there
was no need to stew. Ignorance at twenty-two isn't a structural defect.
After a few days I said to myself, "I can't trade this way here. The ticker doesn't help as
it should!" But I let it go at that without getting down to bed rock. I kept it up, having
good days and bad days, until I was cleaned out. I went to old Fullerton and got him to
stake me to five hundred dollars. And I came back from St. Louis, as I told you, with
money I took out of the bucket shops there a game I could always beat.
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