Highways and Highway Transportation

by George R. Chatburn

Grain Exchanges.

—In the grain business there has been developed a great system of selling through commission merchants, that is, the selling agents take commissions on the sales for their remuneration. A limited number of the commission merchants of a particular city organize themselves into incorporated bodies for the purpose of providing themselves with houses and facilities for doing business and establishing rules for the transaction of the same. Such organizations with places of doing business are known as Grain Exchanges or Boards of Trade. The Board of Trade of Chicago, the most noted grain market in the world, was established in 1846.

Mr. Vincent of the Omaha Grain Exchange explains the matter as follows:[189]

Suppose that a group of twenty-five mule breeders in Missouri came to Omaha to sell several hundred mules, and buyers assemble from several states. The mule dealers find a vacant lot in a convenient locality and secure permission to use it temporarily. It is the mule market, or mule exchange. The buyers and sellers meet and dicker, each trying to secure the best bargain he can. Every purchase or sale is an individual transaction—between one seller and one buyer. The vacant lot or “mule exchange” has nothing to do in the transaction—it occupies no place in the trade. It is simply the location where the traders gather for their own convenience. If the traders hire a clerk to act for all in settling the trades and collecting the money, it is simply because the clerk has the knowledge of a technical nature not possessed by all traders and his employment is a convenience to all concerned. He represents the individual traders and not the mule market.

Now translate mules into cars of grain and the “vacant lot” into a board of trade building erected for the convenience of traders engaged in a permanent business. The transactions held on the board of trade are the individual trades between the individual seller and buyers, just the same as in the mule market. The board of trade is simply the location where buyers come to meet sellers (or their agents the commission men.)

Vincent’s theory that the board of trade is the “location where” is hardly inclusive enough, for only a favored few who have “purchased seats” or are stockholders of the incorporation are privileged to buy and sell on the board of trade, that is, are a part of an organization known as a board of trade. His own pamphlet states that he is a “Member of the Omaha Grain Exchange.”

Vincent defines a commission merchant as “the agent of men (1) who do not have enough grain to sell so they can afford the time and expense to come with the grain so as personally to make the sale, and (2) who would be meeting strangers and who would not know which of the buyers might want the particular kind or grade he might have for sale.” He contends that it is not only an economy to the seller to employ the services of the commission merchant but that it is necessary to have the selling done by some one “who knows who the buyers are in the various lines—corn, oats, barley, and wheat of the different kinds and qualities,” and who knows “the inspection rules and sees that the grain is properly graded—in short” one who “does for his employer, or principal, all those things that he would do for himself if he were in the central market and acquainted with the buyers.”

Vincent upholds the custom of dealing in futures, as it furnishes a sort of insurance to the legitimate dealer in grain. When the local dealer buys, say, 10,000 bushels of wheat which by ordinary methods of business may require from two to four weeks to get to the terminal marketing point, he at the same time sells on board of trade 10,000 bushels for future delivery, thus “hedging” the purchase. If wheat goes up he gains on the actual wheat in transit but loses on his hedge. If wheat goes down he loses on the 10,000 bushels in transit, but gains on his hedge; thus, either way, the one transaction balances the other so there is no gain, and no loss, except the cost of the hedge, and hence no speculation. Hedging is, in short, a sort of insurance that protects the dealer should the price of grain fall between the time he purchased it and the time of selling it at the terminal. The process of hedging when honestly carried on is a stabilizing operation and according to Vincent “effects the commercial transfers of grain from farmer to miller at a less expense than is involved in the marketing of any other product of human endeavor—at less expense than would be possible if grain merchants alone carried all the risk—the speculation.”