High in Low in 1901-1902 1903 Amalgamated 130 33⅝ Am. Smelter 69 36¾ Am. Sugar 153 107⅛ Anaconda 54¼ 25½ Col. F. & I. 136½ 24 Nat’l Lead 32 10½ Tenn. Coal & I. 76⅝ 25⅞ U. S. Rubber 34 7 U. S. Steel 55 10 U. S. Steel, Pfd. 101⅞ 49¾ ------- ------- Average price 84.22 33.01 “It will be observed from the above table that Industrials declined about 51 points while rails declined about 48 points. But the decline cannot be figured in points. The higher range of railroad shares must be considered. A decline of two points in a stock selling at 100 is only equivalent to a decline of one point in a stock selling at 50. Therefore, in order to get a correct view of the matter, we must reduce the decline to percentages. On this basis, railroad stocks lost about 38% of their value, and industrial stocks lost about 60% of their value.”--From Thomas Gibson’s Market Letter, May 4th, 1907. _Undigested Securities._ “The new methods and the new projects are going through the test of fire today, and some of them are being consumed. The tests which weeded out the badly organized and incompetent of the early stock companies, which drove to the wall the “wildcat” banks of ante-bellum days, and which wiped out dividends and stock rights in badly managed railways, are now being applied to the new forms of organization which have been the growth of the past decade. But the stronger and better organized of these new corporations are likely to meet these trials without disaster, or to modify their methods to conform to the teachings of experience, until there remains to the financial world a valuable residuum of new methods for giving flexibility to capital and promoting its transfer promptly and efficiently from the industries where it is not needed to those where it will render its highest service.”--From “Wall Street and the Country,” by Chas. A. Conant. _How to Compute the Value of Rights._ “Inasmuch as the method of computing the value of rights is slightly complicated, an illustration may be given. Let us take the instance of St. Paul again, where the stockholders were allowed to subscribe to 23% of their holdings to new stock at par. The common stock was at that time selling a little below $200 per share. Let us take the round figure, and the operation is as follows: One hundred shares at $200 per share equals $20,000 Twenty-three shares at $100 equals 2,300 ------- Total cost of 123 shares $22,300 “Average cost, $181 per share.