I am not trying to make myself out a wizard when I assure you that I
could tell the moment support came in. It instantly struck me that if
the insiders in that stock, who never felt a moral obligation to keep
the price up, were now buying the stock in the face of a declining
general market there must be a reason. They were not ignorant asses nor
philanthropists nor yet bankers concerned with keeping the price up to
sell more securities over the counter. The price rose notwithstanding
my selling and the selling of others. At 153 I covered my 10,000 shares
and at 156 I actually went long because by that time the tape told me
the line of least resistance was upward. I was bearish on the general
market but I was confronted by a trading condition in a certain stock
and not by a speculative theory in general. The price went out of
sight, above 200. It was the sensation of the year. I was flattered by
reports spoken and printed that I had been squeezed out of eight or
nine millions of dollars. As a matter of fact, instead of being short
I was long of TT all the way up. In fact, I held on a little too long
and let some of my paper profits get away. Do you wish to know why I
did? Because I thought the TT insiders would naturally do what I would
have done had I been in their place. But that was something I had no
business to think because my business is to trade--that is, to stick to
the facts before me and not to what I think other people ought to do.
_XIX_
I do not know when or by whom the word “manipulation” was first used
in connection with what really are no more than common merchandising
processes applied to the sale in bulk of securities on the Stock
Exchange. Rigging the market to facilitate cheap purchases of a stock
which it is desired to accumulate is also manipulation. But it is
different. It may not be necessary to stoop to illegal practices,
but it would be difficult to avoid doing what some would think
illegitimate. How are you going to buy a big block of a stock in a
bull market without putting up the price on yourself? That would be
the problem. How can it be solved? It depends upon so many things that
you can’t give a general solution unless you say: possibly by means
of very adroit manipulation. For instance? Well, it would depend upon
conditions. You can’t give any closer answer than that.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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