Another Chapter in the Bucket Shop Series

I could beat the game my way only in a bucket shop; where I was betting on fluctuations. My tape reading had to do with that exclusively. When I bought the price was there on the quotation board, right in front of me. Even before I bought I knew exactly the price I’d have to pay for my stock.

And I always could sell on the instant. I could scalp successfully, because I could move like lightning. I could follow up my luck or cut my loss in a second. Sometimes, for instance, I was certain a stock would move at least a point. Well, I didn’t have to hog it, I could put up a point margin and double my money in a jiffy; or I’d take half a point. On one or two hundred shares a day, that wouldn’t be bad at the end of the month, what?

I proved it Whenever I read the tape by the light of experience I made money, but when I made a plain fool play I had to lose. I was no exception, was I? There was the huge quotation board staring me in the face, and the ticker going on, and people trading and watching their tickets turn” into cash or into waste paper. Of course I let the craving for excitement get the better of my judgment. In a bucket shop where your margin is a shoestring you don’t play for long pulls. You are wiped too easily and quickly.

At all events, what was a perfect system for trading in bucket shops didn’t work in Fullerton’s office. There I was actually buying and selling stocks. The price of Sugar on the tape might be 105 and I could see a three-point drop coming. As a matter of fact, at the very moment the ticker was printing 105 on the tape the real price on the floor of the Exchange might be 104 or 103. By the time my order to sell a thousand shares got to Fullerton’s floor man to execute, the price might be still lower.

I couldn’t tell at what price I had put out my thousand shares until I got a report from the clerk. When I surely would have made three thousand on the same transaction in a bucket shop I might not make a cent in a Stock Exchange house. Of course, I have taken an extreme case, but the fact remains that in A. R. Fullerton’s office the tape always talked ancient history to me, as far as my system of trading went, and I didn’t realise it.

“No,” I said. “I’m not sure yet I can beat the game in this office, but I am sure I can take money out of the bucket shops. I know that game. I have a notion that I know just where I went wrong here.”

The Stock Exchange and the police between them had succeeded in closing them up pretty tight. Besides, I wanted to find a place where the only limit to my trading would be the size of my stake. I didn’t have much of one, but I didn’t expect it to stay little forever. The main thing at the start was to find a place where I wouldn’t have to worry about getting a square deal.

In short, I did not know the game of stock speculation. I knew a part of it, a rather important part, which has been very valuable to me at all times. But if with all I had I still lost, what chance does the green outsider have of winning, or, rather, of cashing in?

It didn’t take me long to realise that there was something wrong with my play, but I couldn’t spot the exact trouble. There were times when my system worked beautifully, and then, all of a sudden, nothing but one swat after another. I was only twenty-two, remember; not that I was so stuck on myself that I didn’t want to know just where I was at fault, but that at that age nobody knows much of anything.

The people in the office were very nice to me. I couldn’t plunge as I wanted to because of their margin requirements, but old A. R. Fullerton and the rest of the firm were so kind to me that after six months of active trading I not only lost all I had brought and all that I had made there but I even owed the firm a few hundreds.