They also used to form discretionary pools in the office and as a great favor allowed their customers to authorize them, in writing, to trade with the customer’s money and in the customer’s name, as they in their judgment deemed best. That way the most cantankerous customer had no legal redress when the money disappeared. They’d bull a stock, on paper, and put the customers in and then they’d execute one of the old-fashioned bucket-shop drives and wipe out hundreds of shoe-string margins. They did not spare anyone, women, school-teachers and old men being their best bet. “I’m sore on all brokers,” I told the tout. “I’ll have to think this over,” and I left him so he wouldn’t talk any more to me. I inquired about this firm. I learned that they had hundreds of customers and although there were the usual stories I did not find any case of a customer not getting his money from them if he won any. The difficulty was in finding anybody who had ever won in that office; but I did. Things seemed to be going their way just then, and that meant that they probably would not welsh if a trade went against them. Of course most concerns of that kind eventually go broke. There are times when there are regular epidemics of bucketeering bankruptcies, like the old-fashioned runs on several banks after one of them goes up. The customers of the others get frightened and they run to take their money out. But there are plenty of retired bucket-shop keepers in this country. Well, I heard nothing alarming about the tout’s firm except that they were on the make, first, last and all the time, and that they were not always truthful. Their specialty was trimming suckers who wanted to get rich quick. But they always asked their customers’ permission, in writing, to take their rolls away from them. One chap I met did tell me a story about seeing six hundred telegrams go out one day advising customers to get aboard a certain stock and six hundred telegrams to other customers strongly urging them to sell that same stock, at once. “Yes, I know the trick,” I said to the chap who was telling me. “Yes,” he said. “But the next day they sent telegrams to the same people advising them to close out their interest in everything and buy--or sell--another stock. I asked the senior partner, who was in the office, ‘Why do you do that? The first part I understand. Some of your customers are bound to make money on paper for a while, even if they and the others eventually lose. But by sending out telegrams like this you simply kill them all. What’s the big idea?’ “‘Well,’ he said, ‘the customers are bound to lose their money anyhow, no matter what they buy, or how or where or when. When they lose their money I lose the customers. Well, I might as well get as much of their money as I can--and then look for a new crop.’”