Tips! How people want tips! They crave not only to get them but to give them. There is greed involved, and vanity. It is very amusing, at times, to watch really intelligent people fish for them. And the tip-giver need not hesitate about the quality, for the tip-seeker is not really after good tips, but after any tip. If it makes good, fine! If it doesn’t, better luck with the next. I am thinking of the average customer of the average commission house. There is a type of promoter or manipulator that believes in tips first, last and all the time. A good flow of tips is considered by him as a sort of sublimated publicity work, the best merchandising dope in the world, for, since tip-seekers and tip-takers are invariably tip-passers, tip-broadcasting becomes a sort of endless-chain advertising. The tipster-promoter labours under the delusion that no human being breathes who can resist a tip if properly delivered. He studies the art of handing them out artistically. I get tips by the hundreds every day from all sorts of people. I’ll tell you a story about Borneo Tin. You remember when the stock was brought out? It was at the height of the boom. The promoter’s pool had taken the advice of a very clever banker and decided to float the new company in the open market at once instead of letting an underwriting syndicate take its time about it. It was good advice. The only mistake the members of the pool made came from inexperience. They did not know what the stock market was capable of doing during a crazy boom and at the same time they were not intelligently liberal. They were agreed on the need of marking up the price in order to market the stock, but they started the trading at a figure at which the traders and the speculative pioneers could not buy it without misgivings. By rights the promoters ought to have got stuck with it, but in the wild bull market their hoggishness turned out to be rank conservatism. The public was buying anything that was adequately tipped. Investments were not wanted. The demand was for easy money; for the sure gambling profit. Gold was pouring into this country through the huge purchases of war material. They tell me that the promoters, while making their plans for bringing out Borneo stock, marked up the opening price three different times before their first transaction was officially recorded for the benefit of the public.