There are three senses in which this idea of “Them” has some foundation in fact. First, “They” may be and often are roughly conceived of as the floor traders on the Stock Exchange who are directly concerned in making quotations, pools formed to control certain stocks, or individual manipulators. Floor traders exercise an important influence on the immediate movement of prices. Suppose, for example, they observe that offerings of Reading are very light. Declines do not induce liquidation and only small offerings of stock are met on advances. They begin to feel that, in the absence of unexpected cataclysms, Reading will not decline much. The natural thing for them to do is to begin buying Reading on all soft spots. Whenever a few hundred shares are offered at a bargain, floor traders snap up the stock. As a result of this “bailing out” of the market, Reading becomes scarcer still, and traders, being now long, become more bullish. They begin to “mark up prices.” This is not difficult, since they are, for the time being, practically unanimous in a desire for higher prices. Suppose the market is 161⅛ bid, offered at 161¼. They find that only 100 shares are for sale at ¼, and 200 are offered at ⅜. As to how much stock may be awaiting bids at ½ or higher, they cannot be sure, but can generally make a shrewd guess. One or more traders take these offerings, of perhaps 500 shares, and make the market ½ bid. The other floor traders are not willing to sell at this trifling profit, and a wait ensues to see whether any outside orders are attracted by the movement of the price, and if so, whether they are buying or selling orders. If a few buying orders come in, they are filled, perhaps at ⅝ and ¾. If selling appears, the floor traders retire in good order, take the offerings at lower prices, and try it again the next day or perhaps the next hour. Eventually, by seizing every favorable opportunity, they engineer an upward move of perhaps two or three points without taking any more stock than they want. If such a movement attracts a following, it may easily run ten points without any real change in the prospects of the Reading road—though the prospects of the road may have had something to do with making the stock scarce before the movement started. On the other hand, if large offerings of stock are encountered at the advance, the boomlet is ignominiously squelched and the floor traders make trifling profits or losses.