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[ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] business to attend to there and for some reason or other took me with him. We came down Broadway and I remember turning off at Wall Street. We walked down Wall and just as we came to Broad or, rather, Nassau Street, to the corner where the Bankers' Trust Company's: building now stands, I saw a crowd following two men. The first was walking eastward, trying to look unconcerned. He was followed by the other, a redfaced man who was wildly waving his hat with one hand and shaking the other fist in the air. He was yelling to beat the band: `Shylock ! Shylock ! What's the price of money? Shylock ! Shylock !' I could see heads sticking out of windows. They didn't have skyscrapers in those days, but I was sure the second and third-story rubbernecks would tumble out. My father asked what was the matter, and somebody answered something I didn't hear. I was too busy keeping a death clutch on my father's hand so that the jostling wouldn't separate us. The crowd was growing, as street crowds do, and I wasn't comfortable. Wild-eyed men came running down from Nassau Street and up from Broad as well as east and west on Wall Street. After we finally got out of the jam my father explained to me that the man who was shouting `Shylock !' was So-and-So. I have forgotten the name, but he was the biggest operator in clique stocks in the city and was understood to have made and lost more money than any other man in Wall Street with the exception of Jacob Little. I remember Jacob Little's name because I thought it was a 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. 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 thimblerigging, 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 asked time and again to take charge of pools. I am told that in these pool operations he never asked or accepted a fee, but paid for his share like the other members of the pool. The market conduct of the stock, of course, was exclusively in his charge. Often there was talk of treachery on both sides. His feud with the Whitney-Ryan clique arose from such accusations. It is not difficult for a manipulator to be misunderstood by his associates. They don't see his needs as he himself does. I know this from my own experience. It is a matter of regret that Keene did not leave an accurate record of his greatest exploit -- the successful manipulation of the U. S. Steel shares in the spring of igoi. As I understand it, Keene never had an interview with J. P. Morgan about it. Morgan's firm dealt with or through Talbot J. Taylor & Co., at whose office Keene made his headquarters. Talbot Taylor was Keene's son-in-law. I am assured that Keene's fee for his Work consisted of the pleasure he derived from the work. That he made millions trading in the market he helped to put up that spring is well known. He told a friend of mine that in the course of a few weeks he sold in the open market for the underwriters' syndicate more than seven hundred and fifty thousand shares. Not bad when you consider two things That they were new and untried stocks of a corporation whose capitalization was greater than the entire debt of the [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ] |