The aggregate market value of seats on the New York Stock Exchange is
nearly $100,000,000. It costs more than a hundred million dollars more
every year to gather and transact through offices and branch offices
the speculative business which forms the bulk of the transactions of
the members. The "kitty," or "rake-off," is enormous. Who pays it? You
hear of the stockbroker going to Europe in his yacht every Summer. How
many of his trading customers travel that way?
Who pays the freight? Can a game be beaten where so many
multimillionaires are created among those who are on the "inside" and
where so large a percentage of the speculator's money must come out
every year to pay the enormous cost of maintaining a vast system of
stock-brokerage offices, stock exchanges, telegraph and telephone
wires, newspapers, publicity bureaus, yachts, Fifth Avenue palaces,
huge contributions to national and State political campaigns, etc.?
You hear a hue and a cry against bucketshops. There is no Federal
embargo against bucketshopping. Yet somehow or other the machinery of
the Government's Department of Justice is used to crush out this sort
of gambling institution. Now, what is the difference in principle
between gambling on margin on fluctuations of stocks in a bucketshop
and doing the same through a New York Stock Exchange house?
This is the unimportant difference:
The bucketshop-keeper takes the other end of the play, pays you out of
his pocket when the market goes your way and keeps your money when it
goes against you. He never delivers any stocks.
The New York Stock Exchange member is expected to buy your stocks for
you and _carry_ them--some of them do and most of them don't, as
is shown farther on--but in this case also no stocks are delivered to
you.
The transaction is the same in principle as the one in the bucketshop,
so far as the gambling feature is concerned. The only real difference
is that when you gamble on market fluctuations through the bucketshops
no contribution is made to the New York Stock Exchange "kitty."
RIGHTEOUS WALL STREET AND THE "SUCKER" PUBLIC
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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