Mar

6

Wall Street and the Wilds, by A. W. Dimock, from pages 79-89:

Having proclaimed that all speculative systems are fallacious and having denounced their advocates as false or foolish, I am about to exploit one myself, claiming for it a mathematical and logical basis and substantial infallibility in practice. At least it proved unfailing during the years I employed it, and the average daily profits ran into the thousands. That my share of the accumulations failed to remain with me was not the fault of the system, but my own. Through its proceeds great railroads were founded, educational institutions endowed, and family fortunes established. My partner, who looked on askance at first, soon adopted the theory that a method which, though dealing in chance, worked so independently of it, was business and not gambling.

But while the pendulum of the gold tide beat slowly, the rise and fall of the waves was like the swinging balance of a watch. The unit of transactions on the Gold Exchange was five thousand dollars in gold and the prices varied by one eighth of one per cent. On an active day in the market, even though gold might close at the price at which it opened, the fluctuations, counting by eighths, ran high in the hundreds and sometimes invaded the thousands. What was the use of customers with their occasional commissions by the day or the week, when commissions galore hung before my eyes in every change in the market, whether up or down? I made of myself a nerveless machine and for nearly all the three hundred minutes of each daily session stood beside the curved rail that enclosed the Gold Room pit buying five thousand gold at every eighth.

All day I stood there, buying and selling, buying and selling, with a stubby pencil in my right hand and in my left a note-book, on the one and other side of which I dashed down prices with hieroglyphs for names as I nodded to the right and the left my acceptance of bids and offers. One minute might pass without a transaction and in the next a score be crowded. Always my bid and offer were on the floor a quarter per cent apart. Thus if I had just bought five thousand at a premium of fifty and one-eighth per cent, I would bid fifty for five more, and offer to sell five at fifty and one quarter. Every purchase was balanced, sooner or later, by a sale of the same amount at an advance of an eighth per cent. Thus if I made one purchase and sale in each minute of a day's session my profit for that day would be $1,875. Often this profit was multiplied, for in times of much excitement the price would skip the fractions and jump one per cent at a leap, in which case instead of selling five thousand at each eighth advance, making forty thousand at an advance of nine-sixteenths, the whole forty thousand would be sold at an advance of one per cent, an extra profit of $175.

Always the market looked strongest just as it was nearest its culmination and already tottering to its fall. But though reason and experience told me this the burden I carried rested no less heavily on nerves that were sore and quivered at every comment, in the daily press or on the floor of the Exchange, on the phenomenal strength of the market. That which bore me up and carried me through was the constant throbbing of the machine I had created. Buying and selling, always buying and selling at each eighth decline and each eighth advance, helped me to forget the adverse flood that the whole world seemed to predict.

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