Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
can go out and get a roll and come back.”
“How are you going to do it?” asked old A. R.
“I’ll go and trade in a bucket shop,” I told him.
“Trade here,” he said.
“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.”
He let me have it, and I went out of that office where the Boy Terror
of the Bucket Shops, as they called him, had lost his pile. I couldn’t
go back home because the shops there would not take my business. New
York was out of the question; there weren’t any doing business at that
time. They tell me that in the 90’s Broad Street and New Street were
full of them. But there weren’t any when I needed them in my business.
So after some thinking I decided to go to St. Louis. I had heard of two
concerns there that did an enormous business all through the Middle
West. Their profits must have been huge. They had branch offices in
dozens of towns. In fact I had been told that there were no concerns in
the East to compare with them for volume of business. They ran openly
and the best people traded there without any qualms. A fellow even told
me that the owner of one of the concerns was a vice-president of the
Chamber of Commerce but that couldn’t have been in St. Louis. At any
rate, that is where I went with my five hundred dollars to bring back a
stake to use as margin in the office of A. R. Fullerton & Co., members
of the New York Stock Exchange.
When I got to St. Louis I went to the hotel, washed up and went out to
find the bucket shops. One was the J. G. Dolan Company, and the other
was H. S. Teller & Co. I knew I could beat them. I was going to play
dead safe--carefully and conservatively. My one fear was that somebody
might recognize me and give me away, because the bucket shops all over
the country had heard of the Boy Trader. They are like gambling houses
and get all the gossip of the profesh.
Dolan was nearer than Teller, and I went there first. I was hoping I
might be allowed to do business a few days before they told me to take
my trade somewhere else. I walked in. It was a whopping big place and
there must have been at least a couple of hundred people there staring
at the quotations. I was glad, because in such a crowd I stood a better
chance of being unnoticed. I stood and watched the board and looked
them over carefully until I picked out the stock for my initial play.
I looked around and saw the order-clerk at the window where you put
down your money and get your ticket. He was looking at me so I walked
up to him and asked, “Is this where you trade in cotton and wheat?”
“Yes, sonny,” says he.
“Can I buy stocks too?”
“You can if you have the cash,” he said.
“Oh, I got that all right, all right,” I said like a boasting boy.
“You have, have you?” he says with a smile.
“How much stock can I buy for one hundred dollars?” I asked,
peeved-like.
“One hundred; if you got the hundred.”
“I got the hundred. Yes; and two hundred too!” I told him.
“Oh, my!” he said.
“Just you buy me two hundred shares,” I said sharply.
“Two hundred what?” he asked, serious now. It was business.
I looked at the board again as if to guess wisely and told him, “Two
hundred Omaha.”
“All right!” he said. He took my money, counted it and wrote out the
ticket.
“What’s your name?” he asked me, and I answered, “Horace Kent.”
He gave me the ticket and I went away and sat down among the customers
to wait for the roll to grow. I got quick action and I traded several
times that day. On the next day too. In two days I made twenty-eight
hundred dollars, and I was hoping they’d let me finish the week out.
At the rate I was going, that wouldn’t be so bad. Then I’d tackle the
other shop, and if I had similar luck there I’d go back to New York
with a wad I could do something with.
On the morning of the third day, when I went to the window,
bashful-like, to buy five hundred B.R.T. the clerk said to me, “Say,
Mr. Kent, the boss wants to see you.”
I knew the game was up. But I asked him, “What does he want to see me
about?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where is he?”
“In his private office. Go in that way.” And he pointed to a door.
I went in. Dolan was sitting at his desk. He swung around and said,
“Sit down, Livingston.”
He pointed to a chair. My last hope vanished. I don’t know how he
discovered who I was; perhaps from the hotel register.
“What do you want to see me about?” I asked him.
“Listen, kid. I ain’t got nothin’ agin yeh, see? Nothin’ at all. See?”
“No, I don’t see,” I said.
He got up from his swivel chair. He was a whopping big guy. He said to
me, “Just come over here, Livingston, will yeh?” and he walked to the
door. He opened it and then he pointed to the customers in the big room.
“D’yeh see them?” he asked me.
“See what?”
“Them guys. Take a look at ’em, kid. There’s three hundred of ’em!
Three hundred suckers! They feed me and my family. See? Three hundred
suckers! Then yeh come in, and in two days yeh cop more than I get out
of the three hundred in two weeks. That ain’t business, kid--not for
me! I ain’t got nothin’ agin yeh. Yer welcome to what ye’ve got. But
yeh don’t any more. There ain’t any here for yeh!”
“Why, I----”
“That’s all. I seen yeh come in day before yesterday, and I didn’t
like yer looks. On the level, I didn’t. I spotted yeh for a ringer. I
called in that jackass there”--he pointed to the guilty clerk--“and
asked what you’d done; and when he told me I said to him: ‘I don’t
like that guy’s looks. He’s a ringer!’ And that piece of cheese says:
‘Ringer my eye, boss! His name is Horace Kent, and he’s a rah-rah boy
playing at being used to long pants. He’s all right!’ Well, I let him
have his way. That blankety-blank cost me twenty-eight hundred dollars.
I don’t grudge it yeh, my boy. But the safe is locked for yeh.”
“Look here--” I began.
“You look here, Livingston,” he said. “I’ve heard all about yeh. I make
my money coppering suckers’ bets, and yeh don’t belong here. I aim to
be a sport and yer welcome to what yeh pried off’n us. But more of that
would make me a sucker, now that I know who yeh are. So toddle along,
sonny!”
I left Dolan’s place with my twenty-eight hundred dollars’ profit.
Teller’s place was in the same block. I had found out that Teller was
a very rich man who also ran up a lot of pool rooms. I decided to
go to his bucket shop. I wondered whether it would be wise to start
moderately and work up to a thousand shares or to begin with a plunge,
on the theory that I might not be able to trade more than one day. They
get wise mighty quick when they’re losing and I did want to buy one
thousand B.R.T. I was sure I could take four or five points out of it.
But if they got suspicious or if too many customers were long of that
stock they might not let me trade at all. I thought perhaps I’d better
scatter my trades at first and begin small.
It wasn’t as big a place as Dolan’s, but the fixtures were nicer and
evidently the crowd was of a better class. This suited me down to the
ground and I decided to buy my one thousand B.R.T. So I stepped up to
the proper window and said to the clerk, “I’d like to buy some B.R.T.
What’s the limit?”
“There’s no limit,” said the clerk. “You can buy all you please--if
you’ve got the money.”
“Buy fifteen hundred shares,” I says, and took my roll from my pocket
while the clerk starts to write the ticket.
Then I saw a red-headed man just shove that clerk away from the
counter. He leaned across and said to me, “Say, Livingston, you go back
to Dolan’s. We don’t want your business.”
“Wait until I get my ticket,” I said. “I just bought a little B.R.T.”
“You get no ticket here,” he said. By this time other clerks had got
behind him and were looking at me. “Don’t ever come here to trade. We
don’t take your business. Understand?”
There was no sense in getting mad or trying to argue, so I went back
to the hotel, paid my bill and took the first train back to New York.
It was tough. I wanted to take back some real money and that Teller
wouldn’t let me make even one trade.
I got back to New York, paid Fullerton his five hundred, and started
trading again with the St. Louis money. I had good and bad spells, but
I was doing better than breaking even. After all, I didn’t have much to
unlearn; only to grasp the one fact that there was more to the game of
stock speculation than I had considered before I went to Fullerton’s
office to trade. I was like one of those puzzle fans, doing the
crossword puzzles in the Sunday supplement. He isn’t satisfied until he
gets it. Well, I certainly wanted to find the solution to my puzzle. I
thought I was done with trading in bucket shops. But I was mistaken.
About a couple of months after I got back to New York an old jigger
came into Fullerton’s office. He knew A.R. Somebody said they’d once
owned a string of race horses together. It was plain he’d seen better
days. I was introduced to old McDevitt. He was telling the crowd about
a bunch of Western race-track crooks who had just pulled off some skin
game out in St. Louis. The head devil, he said, was a pool-room owner
by the name of Teller.
“What Teller?” I asked him.
“Hi Teller; H. S. Teller.”
“I know that bird,” I said.
“He’s no good,” said McDevitt.
“He’s worse than that,” I said, “and I have a little matter to settle
with him.”
“Meaning how?”
“The only way I can hit any of the short sports is through their
pocketbook. I can’t touch him in St. Louis just now, but some day I
will.” And I told McDevitt my grievance.
“Well,” says old Mac, “he tried to connect here in New York and
couldn’t make it, so he’s opened a place in Hoboken. The word’s gone
out that there is no limit to the play and that the house roll has got
the Rock of Gibraltar faded to the shadow of a bantam flea.”
“What sort of a place?” I thought he meant pool room.
“Bucket shop,” said McDevitt.
“Are you sure it’s open?”
“Yes; I’ve seen several fellows who’ve told me about it.”
“That’s only hearsay,” I said. “Can you find out positively if it’s
running, and also how heavy they’ll really let a man trade?”
“Sure, sonny,” said McDevitt. “I’ll go myself to-morrow morning, and
come back and tell you.”
He did. It seems Teller was already doing a big business and would
take all he could get. This was on Friday. The market had been going
up all that week--this was twenty years ago, remember--and it was a
cinch the bank statement on Saturday would show a big decrease in the
surplus reserve. That would give the conventional excuse to the big
room traders to jump on the market and try to shake out some of the
weak commission-house accounts. There would be the usual reactions in
the last half hour of the trading, particularly in stocks in which the
public had been the most active. Those, of course, also would be the
very stocks that Teller’s customers would be most heavily long of,
and the shop might be glad to see some short selling in them. There
is nothing so nice as catching the suckers both ways; and nothing so
easy--with one-point margins.
That Saturday morning I chased over to Hoboken to the Teller place.
They had fitted up a big customers’ room with a dandy quotation board
and a full force of clerks and a special policeman in gray. There were
about twenty-five customers.
I got talking to the manager. He asked me what he could do for me and
I told him nothing; that a fellow could make much more money at the
track on account of the odds and the freedom to bet your whole roll and
stand to win thousands in minutes instead of piking for chicken feed in
stocks and having to wait days, perhaps. He began to tell me how much