By the time I reached my office and read my mail before the market opened I was made aware that the Street was flooded with red-hot tips to buy Consolidated Stove at once. My telephone bell kept ringing and the clerk who answered the calls heard the same question asked in one form or another a hundred times that morning: Was it true that Consolidated Stove was going up? I must say that Joshua Wolff and Kane and Gordon—and possibly Jim Barnes—handled that little tipping job mighty well.
I had no idea that I had such a following. Why, that morning the buying orders came in from all over the country—orders to buy thousands of shares of a stock that nobody wanted at any price three days before. And don’t forget that, as a matter of fact, all that the public had to go by was my newspaper reputation as a successful plunger; something for which I had to thank an imaginative reporter or two.
Well, sir, on that, the third day of the rise, I sold Consolidated Stove; and on the fourth day and the fifth; and the first thing I knew I had sold for Jim Barnes the one hundred thousand shares of stock which the Marshall National Bank held as collateral on the three-million-five-hundred-thousand-dollar loan that needed paying off. If the most successful manipulation consists of that in which the desired end is gained at the least possible cost to the manipulator, the Consolidated Stove deal is by all means the most successful of my Wall Street career. Why, at no time did I have to take any stock. I didn’t have to buy first in order to sell the more easily later on. I did not put up the price to the highest possible point and then begin my real selling. I didn’t even do my principal selling on the way down, but on the way up. It was like a dream of Paradise to find an adequate buying power created for you without your stirring a finger to bring it about, particularly when you were in a hurry. I once heard a friend of Governor Flower’s say that in one of the great bull-leader’s operations for the account of a pool in B. R. T. the pool sold fifty thousand shares of the stock at a profit, but Flower & Co. got commissions on more than two hundred and fifty thousand shares and W. P. Hamilton says that to distribute two hundred and twenty thousand shares of Amalgamated Copper, James R. Keene must have traded in at least seven hundred thousand shares of the stock during the necessary manipulation. Some commission bill! Think of that and then consider that the only commissions that I had to pay were the commissions on the one hundred thousand shares I actually sold for Jim Barnes. I call that some saving.
Having sold what I had engaged to sell for my friend Jim, and all the money the syndicate had agreed to raise not having been sent in, and feeling no desire to buy back any of the stock I had sold, I rather think I went away somewhere for a short vacation. I do not remember exactly. But I do remember very well that I let the stock alone and that it was not long before the price began to sag. One day, when the entire market was weak, some disappointed bull wanted to get rid of his Consolidated Stove in a hurry, and on his offerings the stock broke below the call price, which was 40. Nobody seemed to want any of it. As I told you before, I wasn’t bullish on the general situation and that made me more grateful than ever for the miracle that had enabled me to dispose of the one hundred thousand shares without having to put the price up twenty or thirty points in a week, as the kindly tipsters had prophesied.
Finding no support, the price developed a habit of declining regularly until one day it broke rather badly and touched 32. That was the lowest that had ever been recorded for it, for, as you will remember, Jim Barnes and the original syndicate had pegged it at 37 in order not to have their one hundred thousand shares dumped on the market by the bank.
I was in my office that day peacefully studying the tape when Joshua Wolff was announced. I said I would see him. He rushed in. He is not a very large man, but he certainly seemed all swelled up—with anger, as I instantly discovered.
He ran to where I stood by the ticker and yelled, “Hey? What the devil’s the matter?”
“Have a chair, Mr. Wolff,” I said politely and sat down myself to encourage him to talk calmly.
“I don’t want any chair! I want to know what it means!” he cried at the top of his voice.
“What does what mean?”