“They couldn’t pay you too much,” replied Tompkinson. “You’re the biggest drawing card in the club. They probably pull in a half million dollars a year more than they would if you were not on the team.”
“You say they pay you enough,” put in Harrish. “But my experience is that nothing is enough if you can make more. Do you ever take a flier in stocks, Mr. Matson?”
“Not I,” returned Joe. “I never play another man’s game. Baseball is my game, and I’m going to stick to it. There are enough lambs getting shorn in Wall Street without my adding to the number.”
“Very true,” admitted Tompkinson, with a careless laugh. “At the same time fortunes are being made there. The reason that the lambs, as you call them, get shorn is because they go in blindly. If they had skillful guidance from some of the men who are really on the inside of what is going on they could pick up thousands of easy money.”
“No doubt,” agreed Joe. “The thing is to find the insiders.”
“I think without patting ourselves on the back Mr. Tompkinson and I can be fairly counted as insiders,” remarked Harrish. “We’re on the directorates of a number of important corporations and we know when dividends are going to be passed or paid or increased. And we know that several days before the public does. If the dividend is to be passed, we can buy for a fall. If it’s going to be increased, we buy for a rise. In either case we make money.”
“In other words you’re betting on a sure thing,” remarked Joe dryly, with a growing distaste for his companions.
“Doesn’t seem exactly sportsmanlike, does it?” smiled Harrish. “As a matter of fact, we don’t put it that way. It is simply capitalizing our knowledge, a perfectly legitimate thing to do.”
“But the money you make is lost by somebody else,” remarked Joe.
“That’s their lookout,” said Tompkinson. “They don’t have to buy or sell unless they want to. If we have first-hand knowledge that other people haven’t, that’s our good fortune. If we utilize that knowledge, that’s our brains. But leaving all that out of the question, the point is that we know how to make money for ourselves in Wall Street, and sometimes, when we like a man very much, we pass the knowledge on to him.”