Trading Blogers

I went to work when I was just out of grammar school. I got a job as quotation-board boy in a stockbrokerage office. I was quick at figures. At school I did three years of arithmetic in one. I was particularly good at mental arithmetic. As quotation-board boy I posted the numbers on the big board in the customers’ room. One of the customers usually sat by the ticker and called out the prices. They couldn’t come too fast for me. I have always remembered figures. No trouble at all.

There were plenty of other employees in that office. Of course I made friends with the other fellows, but the work I did, if the market was active, kept me too busy from ten a.m. to three p.m. to let me do much talking. I don’t care for it, anyhow, during business hours.

“They said, ‘You blankety-blank fool, didn’t we tell you to take no business from Larry Livingston? And you deliberately let him trim us out of $700!” He didn’t say what else they told him.

I tried the other branches one after another, but they all got to know me, and my money wasn’t any good in any of their offices. I couldn’t even go in to look at the quotations without some of the clerks making cracks at me. I tried to get them to let me trade at long intervals by dividing my visits among them all. But that didn’t work.

Finally there was only one left to me and that was the biggest and richest of all the Cosmopolitan Stock Brokerage Company.

You can spot, for instance, where the buying is only a trifle better than the selling. A battle goes on in the stock market and the tape is your telescope. You can depend upon it seven out of ten cases.

But they did the next worse thing that is, they made me put up a three-point margin and compelled me to pay a premium at first of a half point, then a point, and finally, a point and a half. Some handicap, that! How? Easy! Suppose Steel was selling at 90 and you bought it. Your ticket read, normally: “Bot ten Steel at 90-1/8.” If you put up a point margin it meant that if it broke 89-1/4 you were wiped out automatically. In a bucket shop the customer is not importuned for more margin or put to the painful necessity of telling his broker to sell for anything he can get.

But when the Cosmopolitan tacked on that premium they were hitting below the belt. It meant that if the price was 90 when I bought, instead of making my ticket: “Bot Steel at 90-l/8,” it read: “Bot Steel at 91-1/8.” Why, that stock could advance a point and a quarter after I bought it and I’d still be losing money if I closed the trade. And by also insisting that I put up a three-point margin at the very start they reduced my trading capacity by two thirds. Still, that was the only bucket shop that would take my business at all, and I had to accept their terms or quit trading.