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"What's the name of the firm?" I asked him.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
He told me. I had heard about them. They ran ads in all the papers, calling attention to
the great profits made by those customers who followed their inside information on
active stocks. That was the firm's great specialty. They were not a regular bucket shop,
but bucketeers, alleged brokers who bucketed their orders but nevertheless went through
an elaborate camouflage to convince the world that they were regular brokers engaged in
a legitimate business. They were one of the oldest of that class of firms.
They were the prototype at that time of the same sort of brokers that went broke this
year by the dozen. The general principles and methods were the same, though the
particular devices for fleecing the public differed somewhat, certain details having been
changed when the old tricks became too well known.
These people used to send out tips to buy or sell a certain stock hundreds of telegrams
advising the instant purchase of a certain stock and hundreds recommending other
customers to sell the same stock, on the old racing-tipster plan. Then orders to buy and
sell would come in. The firm would buy and sell, say, a thousand of that stock through a
reputable Stock Exchange firm and get a regular report on it. This report they would
show to any doubting Thomas who was impolite enough to speak about bucketing
customers' orders.
They also used to form discretionary pools in the office and as a great favor allowed
their customers to authorize them, in writing, to trade with the customer's money and in
the customer's name, as they in their judgment deemed best. That way the most
cantankerous customer had no legal redress when his money disappeared. They'd bull a
stock, on paper, and put the customers in and then they'd execute one of the oldfashioned
bucket-shop drives and wipe out hundreds of shoestring margins. They did not
spare anyone, women, schoolteachers and old men being their best bet.
"I'm sore on all brokers," I told the tout. "I'll have to think this over," and I left him so he
wouldn't talk any more to me.
I inquired about this firm. I learned that they had hundreds of customers and although
there were the usual stories I did not find any case of a customer not getting his money
from them if he won any. The difficulty was in finding anybody who had ever won in
that office; but I did. Things seemed to be going their way just then, and that meant that
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