The theory advanced by some of the economists that the trading public merely lost their paper profits, and practically nothing else was either gained or lost in the tremendous rise and fall of stocks, is a little misleading. One authority says: “For the shrinkage of thirty-five or forty billions of dollars in stock exchange securities nobody is any poorer but on account of things possessed and consumed too soon.” Assuming that the market started at a given point in 1924 and reacted to that point in 1929, it would mean a loss of many hundreds of millions in commissions and interest. It is estimated that in 1929 alone the commissions for transactions on the two “Big Boards” amounted to well upward of five hundred million dollars. Most of the margin traders lost all of their original investment, and many of them all they could borrow on their notes, their life insurance policies, and even their homes. All this by way of retrospect. The vital question that confronts us is: will traders and investors profit by the experience? Apparently not. The survivors of the late catastrophe promptly formed a “wrecking crew,” and are at the present moment busily engaged in rebuilding the market structure on pretty much the same lines as before. The rumor band has been reorganized and is piping its old-time music into the ears of all listeners. The tipsters are also lined up, and with the cheery cry that the storm is all over they are wheedling and coaxing the public to come out of the storm cellars and get aboard the reconstruction train. They harp persistently on the fact that stocks are cheap,--not because of their dividend return, but because they are selling much below the boom prices. Their calculations are drawn mostly from figures at the big end of the measuring tape. Improved business--which exists more in the imagination than in fact--is employed as a smoke screen to hide the fact that the great majority of the active stocks are still selling far above a reasonable investment basis. At their present prices ten of the best known representative common stocks,--U. S. Steel, General Electric, Westinghouse Electric, Atchison, American Tobacco, Radio, Consolidated Gas, American & Foreign Power, Columbia Gas and Johns-Manville, pay an average return of two and nine-tenths per cent. In other words, at going prices if you bought one share each of these ten stocks the total cost would be $1425 on which you would receive an annual dividend of $41.60, or less than the return on U. S. Government bonds. It is therefore clear that a bull market constructed on this basis must be a highly speculative affair. In February, 1930, the financial editor of the New York Herald Tribune printed the following comment:--