was one of those American originals whose amplifications (especially in the hands of a writer as gifted as Lefèvre) merely served to enhance the overall verisimilitude of his story.
And so we have a tell-all confession of how traders worked in the era predating the federal securities laws: of the tipsters, the manipulations, the brazen efforts by corporate managers to ride their own stocks up and down and always in advance of a hapless public. A modern writer called Reminiscences a portrait of “a period in the stock market that no longer exists.” This is true and yet it is untrue. Human nature has not noticeably improved since Lefèvre’s day, nor have the morals of those attracted to Wall Street as a source of easy swag. When Lefèvre-cum-Livingston observes, “In every boom companies are formed primarily if not exclusively to take advantage of the public’s appetite for stocks,” not a few contemporary hucksters (dot.com promoters, for instance) come to mind.
And yet the tempo, the patois of his characters, is sheer Roaring Twenties. Livingston in Atlantic City, supposedly taking a break from the market, could easily be one of Damon Runyon’s track-addicted horse players.
One morning after we had breakfasted and had finished reading all the New York morning papers, and had got tired of watching the sea gulls picking up clams and flying up with them twenty feet in the air and dropping them on the hard wet sand to open them for their breakfast, my friend and I started up the Boardwalk… Harding Brothers had a branch office on the Boardwalk and we used to drop in every morning and see how they’d opened. It was more force of habit than anything else.
This is the signal that Livingston is getting the itch to trade, if only there is some action in the market. Sure enough —
I was looking over the quotation board, noticing the changes – they were mostly advances – until I came to Union Pacific. I got a feeling that I ought to sell it. I can’t tell you more. I just felt like selling it.
Prose that good is its own reason. But there are at least two others that are worthy of mention. The first is personal. Since parting ways with the copper market, I have been, for most of my career, tailing financial operators who were, shall we say, less than saintly and in some cases downright roguish. Most of them have hidden behind hired mouthpieces (later, they hide behind their lawyers). They give us a sanitized version or no version at all.
Livingston, though admittedly a literary construct, speaks directly to us. He names names and pins prices. Does not the president of the Borneo Tin Company, a Mr. Wisenstein, whisper to Livingston’s wife, during a dinner in Palm Beach, that she will make “a great deal of money” by buying his stock? Livingston’s “reminiscence” uncorks the fragrance of the sugary corruption that permeated the Wall Street of those freewheeling days far more than can any secondary source, not to mention any publicist.
Livingston’s response to the whisperer is too good to reveal here, but it will not give away too much to note that Livingston has prepared us for the encounter by observing, matter of factly, that Wisenstein is also the manager of the stock pool. That is to say, the company president is in charge of market operations (all of which would now be illegal) to manipulate the price of the company stock! When folks complain about regulation, as they always have and always will, we must ask whether the good old days were really so good.
Nor does Livingston shy from recounting, stroke by stroke, his own manipulations. I had not thought it possible to create, through cleverly timed purchases, the aura of such interest in a stock that one might move the price higher even while, on a net basis, dispensing of a position in it. Livingston turns the trick with Imperial Steel – ”a beautiful piece of manipulation,” as he allows in an uncommonly self-congratulatory mood. Perhaps he’s a trifle defensive, for he crankily objects to the fact that stock manipulation has gotten a bad name, and insists there is nothing crooked or underhanded about it. It is a brave show, but Livingston’s own prescriptions for cleaning up the market, some of which anticipate the soon-to-be-enacted securities laws, betray the stirrings of a sense of propriety. At all events, we get to hear the operator’s unvarnished account of his own machinations.
The other reason for reading Lefèvre is, of course, that his anecdotal yarns are strung with pearls of advice that the aspiring trader will find most useful. I am not a trader, and I admit that the business of following the tape has always struck me as a sure route to buying high and selling low. Livingston, of course, recognized this danger; you will see his answer. He also recognized that what he did was very different from “investing.” Speculators buy the trend; investors are in for the long haul; “they are a different breed of cats.” One reason that people lose money today is that they have lost sight of this distinction; they profess to have the long term in mind and yet cannot resist following where the hot money has led. Livingston had no delusions; he was a speculator first and last. Yet, surprisingly, the qualities that worked for him are also those of a great stock picker. These qualities are patience, self-discipline, and a mind-set of detachment. One could get angry at the tape, but the tape didn’t care. Livingston deduced that it was better to learn from his mistakes rather than to pretend he hadn’t made them. His distinguishing trait would seem to have been self-awareness. As with gambling – as with any sport – it is our inner demons that do most harm.
You would expect a speculator to covet tips – Livingston calls them “hope cocktails” – but he urges us (and himself) to resist their siren. This reflects his keen appreciation of market psychology. be evident from If somebody likes a stock, it should the tape; if it is not, then the tip is a false lead; it is empty air. The public is craven for tips; it wants to be told. But Livingston confidently repeats, “I have always played a lone hand.”
Well, almost. Once in Saratoga Springs, another of those resorts where he goes to pretend that he is on vacation, Livingston sells a stock he had been accumulating (once again, it is Union Pacific) on the basis of a tip from his broker. The tip turns out to be wrong. It is a costly error – instructive to him and also to us. Our teacher ruefully reflects that he could have learned the same lesson while losing a lot less money. “But Fate does not always let you fix the tuition fee. She delivers the educational wallop and presents her own bill.” Happily, Fate has delivered the education to us at a far more reasonable price. It, along with the exquisite pleasure to be found in Lefèvre’s street-smart narration, has been attracting stock market fans to Reminiscences through many a bull and bear market.
Chapter I
I went to work when I was just out of grammar school. I got a job as quotation-board boy in a stock-brokerage office. I was quick at figures. At school I did three years of arithmetic in one. I was particularly good at mental arithmetic. As quotation-board boy I posted the numbers on the big board in the customers’ room. One of the customers usually sat by the ticker and called out the prices. They couldn’t come too fast for me. I have always remembered figures. No trouble at all.
There were plenty of other employes in that office. Of course I made friends with the other fellows, but the work I did, if the market was active, kept me too busy from ten A.M. to three P.M. to let me do much talking. I don’t care for it, anyhow, during business hours.
But a busy market did not keep me from thinking about the work. Those quotations did not represent prices of stocks to me, so many dollars per share. They were numbers. Of course, they meant something. They were always changing. It was all I had to be interested in – the changes. Why did they change? I didn’t know. I didn’t care. I didn’t think about that. I simply saw that they changed. That was all I had to think about five hours every day and two on Saturdays: that they were always changing.
That is how I first came to be interested in the behaviour of prices. I had a very good memory for figures. I could remember in detail how the prices had acted on the previous day, just before they went up or down. My fondness for mental arithmetic came in very handy.
I
