VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
"Not I; the tape," I said. There wasn't any ticker there so there wasn't any tape. But he
knew what I meant.
"I've heard of those birds," he said, "who look at the tape and instead of seeing prices
they see a railroad time-table of the arrival and departure of stocks. But they were in
padded cells where they couldn't hurt themselves."
I didn't answer him anything because about that time the boy brought me a
memorandum. They had sold five thousand shares at 299-3/4. I knew our quotations
were a little behind the market. The price on the board at Palm Beach when I gave the
operator the order to sell was 301. I felt so certain that at that very moment the price at
which the stock was actually selling on the Stock Exchange in New York was less, that
if anybody had offered to take the stock off my hands at 296 I'd have been tickled to
death to accept. What happened shows you that I am right in never trading at limits.
Suppose I had limited my selling price to 300? I'd never have got it off. No, sir! When
you want to get out, get out.
Now, my stock cost me about 300. They got off five hundred shares full shares, of
course at 299-3/4. The next thousand they sold at 299-5/8. Then a hundred at 1/2; two
hundred at 3/8 and two hundred at 1/4. The last of my stock went at 298-3/4. It took
Harding's cleverest floor man fifteen minutes to get rid of that last one hundred shares.
They didn't want to crack it wide open.
The moment I got the report of the sale of the last of my long stock I started to do what I
had really come ashore to do that is, to sell stocks. I simply had to. There was the market
after its outrageous rally, begging to be sold. Why, people were beginning to talk bullish
again. The course of the market, however, told me that the rally had run its course. It
was safe to sell them. It did not require reflection.
The next day Anaconda opened below 296. Oliver Black, who was waiting for a further
rally, had come down early to be Johnny-on-the-spot when the stock crossed 320. I don't
know how much of it he was long of or whether he was long of it at all. But he didn't
laugh when he saw the opening prices, nor later in the day when the stock broke still
more and the report came back to us in Palm Beach that there was no market for it at all.
Of course that was all the confirmation any man needed. My growing paper profit kept
reminding me that I was right, hour by hour. Naturally I sold some more stocks.
- 88 -