One day one of the office boys -- he was older than I came
to me where I was eating my lunch and asked me on the quiet if I
had any money.
"Why do you want to know?" I said.
"Well," he said, "I've got a dandy tip on Burlington. I'm
going to play it if I can get somebody to go in with me."
"How do you mean, play it?" I asked. To me the only people
who played or could play tips were the customers old jiggers
with oodles of dough. Why, it cost hundreds, even thousands of
dollars, to get into the game. It was like owning your private
carriage and having a coachman who wore a silk hat.
"That's what I mean; play it 1" he said. "How much you got.
"How much you need?"
"Well, I can trade in five shares by putting up $5."
"How are you going to play it?"
"I'm going to buy all the Burlington the bucket shop will
let me carry with the money I give him for margin," he said.
"It's going up sure. It's like picking up money. We'll double
ours in a jiffy."
"Hold on!" I said to him, and pulled out my little dope
book.
I wasn't interested in doubling my money, but in his saying
that Burlington was going up. If it was, my notebook ought to
show it. I looked. Sure enough, Burlington, according to my
figuring, was acting as it usually did before it went up. I had
never bought or sold anything in my life, and I never gambled
with the other boys. But all I could see was that this was a
grand chance to test the accuracy of my work, of my hobby. It
struck me at once that if my dope didn't work in practice there
was nothing in the theory of it to interest anybody. So I gave
him all I had, and with our pooled resources he went to one of
the nearby bucket shops and bought some Burlington. Two days
later we cashed in. I made a profit Of $3.12.
After that first trade, I got to speculating on my own hook
in the bucket shops. I'd go during my lunch hour and buy or sell
-- it never made any difference to me. I was playing a system
and not a favorite stock or backing opinions. All I knew was the
arithmetic of it. As a matter of fact, mine was the ideal way to
operate in a bucket shop, where all that a trader does is to bet
on fluctuations as they are printed by the ticker on the tape.
[...]Anyhow, at fifteen I was making a good living out of the
stock market. I began in the smaller bucket shops, where the man
who traded in twenty shares at a clip was suspected of being
John W. Gates in disguise or J. P. Morgan traveling incognito.
Bucket shops in those days seldom lay down on their customers.
They didn't have to. There were other ways of parting customers
from their money, even when they guessed right. The business was
tremendously profitable. When it was conducted legitimately -- I
mean straight, as far as the bucket shop went the fluctuations
took care of the shoestrings. It doesn't take much of a reaction
to wipe out a margin of only three quarters of a point. Also, no
welsher could ever get back in the game. Wouldn't have any
trade.
tratto da
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