Stock character

“ If the market value-perhaps the closest approximation to the true value in money-of the corporate property as a whole were inquired into, the market value of the capital stock would become a controlling factor in fixing the value of the property. * * * The market value of the capital stock, it is urged, has no necessary relation to the value of the tangible property of the corporation. ”

“ In this way has the Stock Market been established and forced from its original situation by a set of jobbers and brokers, who are all, it will be seen, interested in keeping their transactions from the eye of the public. These men being always ready either to buy or sell, renders it easy for the brokers to get their business done, having no trouble but merely stepping into the Stock Exchange. ”

“ The speculating public gets action, likes it, and invests money that might have been used in margin-trading on the New York Stock Exchange or for "investment" in the constantly fluctuating low-priced industrials or higher-priced mining stocks that are sponsored by big interests with New York Stock Exchange affiliations. ”

“ Suppose that the information afforded by public quotations on the stock and produce exchanges were wiped from the slate of human knowledge. How would the average man, how even would a man with the intelligence and foresight of a Pierpont Morgan, determine how new capital should be invested? ”

“ Immense storerooms for keeping finished stock are shown with pride, unmindful of the fact that every dollar's worth of unnecessary stock on the shelves in the stockroom, every dollar's worth of unnecessary work in the plant, represents idle money and faulty management. ”

“ Indeed, few rich commodities were to be obtained without paying a heavy sum in this particular stock, and a man’s business was seldom very lucrative unless he knew precisely when and how to throw his hoard of conscience into the market. Yet as this stock was the only thing of permanent value, whoever parted with it was sure to find himself a loser in the long run. ”

“ Contrary to the prevailing notion that there is no public utility in anything which does not produce something, or that does not transform and improve products by the processes of manufacture, or interchange them by the operations of commerce, the Stock Exchange is an institution of the highest utility and of vital necessity in an age and country of progress, of commercial and financial activity and of material development. ”

“ The desire for sudden wealth is strong in all parts of our American community. Men want money, and women too, for a score of reasons—some good, some bad—and the stock-market is the magical place where miracles occur and dollars multiply themselves overnight. The agent for all the cupidity of the world is the stock-broker, and he sees life from a strange angle. ”

“ The market tipsters, the financial editors of newspapers, the brokers’ letters and all stock market literature, with but few exceptions, were crowing loud and boastfully for still higher prices, and after the whole group of stocks had risen in unison for a time, some individual stock was singled out every day or so, pushed into the forefront and skyrocketed to dizzying heights. The brokers and all the customers were delirious with joy and excitement. ”

“ As soon as stock has accumulated in the hands of particular persons, some of them will naturally employ it in setting to work industrious people, whom they will supply with materials and subsistence, in order to make a profit by the sale of their work, or by what their labour adds to the value of the materials. ”

“ The public will absorb the common stock—on which dividends are probable. We may be extravagant in paying for the mills which shall form our nucleus—but when we have demonstrated our power"—an ungenial smile crossed his face—"we shall be able to recoup by acquiring other properties at bargain prices." ”

“ Since most of the country’s wealth and commerce is controlled by corporations whose securities are listed on the various stock exchanges, the price fluctuations, which often reach the daily aggregate of hundreds of millions of dollars, either in loss or enhancement of value, are necessarily a matter of general concern. ”

“ It may be noticed, too, that sales of "rights," of puts and calls and straddles, and other contract rights, are regular factors in the organized exchanges. Wherever profits are to be made by leveling values as between different places or different times, speculation arises, and, with dynamic change, this means everywhere, in every business, and all the time! The shifting of labor and capital from industry to industry, leveling returns to capital and labor, involves an enormous amount of trading that would not occur in a "normal equilibrium." Much of this the Stock Exchange does. ”

“ They don't play little horses and other games in public for francs, like the French, for the law forbids it, but I don't believe that any one, except we bankers and brokers, realizes how widely exists the habit of playing the stock-market. Thousands of people, big and little, sanctimonious and highly respectable, put up their margins and reap their profits or their losses. ”

“ The answer is, they are selling us out; and the proof is published daily, in the stock market quotations for the securities of these corporations. That is one kind of proof to which there is no answer, Judd; other people may be fooled about money matters, but the men who buy and sell in Wall Street are not fooled for long; they watch earnings, and, automatically every stock takes the ranking to which its dividends entitle it. ”

“ If he wins, instead of withdrawing the original capital, with perhaps a little more, he usually stakes the whole amount on every venture until it is lost.
Viewing the stock market calmly in the perspective, it is not a question whether stocks will rise or fall ”

“ Of course it becomes the interest of these stock-holders, or pre-emption right companies, to use all possible means of accomplishing the end they have in view; and from the almost incalculable increase of the value of the stock, they can well afford to be at any expense, that may be necessary. ”

“ It is the income drawn from land and labour, and not any benefit rendered to commerce by stock, which causes its wealth. And this fact is the true reason, why stock transplants men from the natural interests of society, into the artificial interest of paper and patronage.
To buy cheap, and to sell dear, is admitted to be the object of commerce. The English mode of effecting these objects, is to compel labour to sell, and foreign nations to buy, at the prices which paper monopoly shall settle. ”

“ Capital [might] be so expended, whilst the profits of stock gave any return, not ten per cent. but one per cent. or a half per cent.
No doubt money varies more slowly than other commodities for the reason you mention; nevertheless its value, like every other foreign commodity, depends on the labour and expense of bringing it to market. ”

“ The average merchant cares little whether his ship brings cloth and cotton, or opium and rum. The average capitalist does not wish the stock of his manufacturing company divided into small shares, so that the operatives can invest their savings therein and have a portion of the large dividends of the rich ”

“ Tens of thousands of people who for years had been imbibing the daily financial chronicles of the newspapers, but whose incomes were not sufficient to permit them to indulge in stock-market speculation in rails and industrials, found in cheap mining stocks the thing they were looking for—an opportunity for those with limited capital to give full play to their gambling, or speculative, instinct. ”

“ In practice a large part of the paid-up stock as well as of the running stock is subscribed for and held not by large capitalists but by persons of small means, especially "the more frugal element in the working classes." ”

“ Wild speculation by all classes of the community, particularly in land, mining shares, and Stock Exchange securities, but not as a rule in produce, the wealthiest capitalists in the country entering into stock speculation in the late summer, and using most unscrupulously their power over company finance to help along their purposes ”

“ But the stock-broker, as he exists in the every-day life of our community, typifies signally the gambler’s yearning to gain wealth by short cuts, and the monomania which regards as pitiable those who do not possess and display the gewgaws of feverish, fashionable materialism. There are stock-brokers in all the great capitals of the world, but nowhere has the vocation swallowed up the sons of the best people to the extent that it has done here during the last thirty years. ”

“ Every class, clergy and laity, peers and plebeians, statesmen and princes,—nay, even ladies, who had, or could produce money for that purpose, turned stock-jobbers, outbidding each other with such avidity, that, in November, 1719, after some fluctuations, the price of shares rose to more than sixty times the sum for which they were originally sold! ”

“ The stock market might have given me a twist but you know the old saying—you can’t keep a good man in glass houses. Right now I know where there’s a package of money all wrapped up and waiting for me to call around and collect it. ”

“ His faith in the Amalgamated property, the men who control and manage it, and the stock is the same as it always has been. He, like yourself, added to his holdings at 120, and as high as 129, and knowing what he does about the property, and what the men who control and manage it, and with whom he is intimately associated, say to him, he cannot believe the yarns which are appearing in the press are other than the vaporings of those stock-market critics who must write their opinions of prominent stocks even though they have no means of actually knowing anything about them. ”

“ One sees it in the speculations of laboring men, in the ventures of merchants outside of their regular business, in the gift enterprise shops, in the church-fair raffle and grab-bag. As I have before stated, buying shares in the stock market in the hope of a rise not based on development is as pure gambling as putting money on a monte card, and its evil effects are seen by the hundreds of working men practically ruined thereby. ”

“ Stock raising offers a profitable avenue for the investment of means. Here are many avenues in which they, who have been overturned in their mercantile pursuits, can invest their means, which will pay larger profits, and which are far less liable to fluctuation, because mercantile pursuits are often subject to great depression through being overdone, or through scarcity of money and other causes. ”

“ This luxury pay, issued in a different currency than the commodity pay, could be used in any way a person saw fit. Some people naturally developed the idea of investing stock in a particularly virtuous or intelligent person. Every time that person did a good deed, the stockholders received a dividend from his luxury pay. All of the scientists and philosophers, therefore, became corporations in themselves, with as many as five thousand people holding stock in one man. ”

“ That was not the first time that the marketable value of a name that is known had been used to exploit a corporation. Any man of standing has many such offers.
The shares of stock that had been purchased for four cents each were peddled on the curb at fifty cents. Then they were advanced to sixty cents. Soon a "market"—so called—was made and the stock found a ready sale. Point by point it was advanced until it actually was eagerly sought by investors, who were not only willing but eager to pay four dollars a share for it. ”

“ Men of Wall Street, it is impossible to prevent the repetition of those acts by which in five years I have accumulated a billion dollars, impossible so long as a short sale or a repurchase and resale, is allowed. When short sales, and repurchases and resales, are made impossible, stock speculation will be dead. ”

“ There are now six industrial companies with an aggregate capital of 171,927,540 shares outstanding; and from the side lines it looks as if there ought to be time enough to start another boom when the stock market gets over its present case of indigestion.
In the final analysis the following essentials should be constantly borne in mind: The stock and grain markets are always capable of playing new tricks on you—of doing things you never dreamed of. ”

“ STOCKHOLDERS Or it may be that the manufacturing company does not ask the capitalist to assist, but itself goes to the small investor with a prospectus of the enterprise, and offers to sell stock in the concern at $50 or $100 a share, as the case may be. ”

“ A stock is bought up freely at New York because London is taking large amounts of it; a day or two later, the deliveries show that large holders connected 203with the management are unloading on the foreign market upon knowledge of facts damaging to the prospects of the property; the late buyers then rush to realize, and pocket a loss instead of a profit. ”

“ If he wanted to realize full value for his holdings he would have to go about it in a different way, for if he should throw his 40,000 shares into the market it would knock the bottom out of prices, and he would get little or nothing for his stock. ”

“ The stocks accumulated in them come in time to be so great, that it can no longer be employed with the ancient profit in that species of industry which in peculiar to them. That industry has its limits like every other; and the increase of stock, by increasing the competition, necessarily reduces the profit. The lowering of profit in the town forces out stock to the country, where, by creating a new demand for country labour, it necessarily raises its wages. ”

“ As the majority of these exhibitors of stock had no special knowledge of stock, they were compelled to place themselves entirely in the hands of their managers and stockman, who generally received by arrangement a certain percentage of the prize money won by the stock. ”