The holder of securities listed on the Stock Exchange is quite differently situated. He is altogether independent. He knows the price of his holdings every hour of the day. He is exposed to no fraud, and at the mercy of no rumor and no unscrupulous dealer. He has positive assurance that in case of necessity, at a moment’s notice, he can obtain at the prevailing price the value in cash of every Stock Exchange security in his box. The ticker gives him instantaneous quotations. All the newspapers publish authorized prices for his benefit, and, as we have just seen, these quotations are not a one-man affair, but the combined judgment of thousands of experts, bulls and bears, bankers and brokers, speculators and investors, all over the world, bidding and offering against each other by cable and telegraph and recording the epitomized result of their bidding in the prices current on the Stock Exchange. Such a man knows, moreover, that the price thus established is not merely the opinion of all these minds as to values to-day, but that it represents a critical look into the future. He knows, indeed, that financiers everywhere have in mind prospective values rather than present values, and so he acquires a double advantage in regulating his own action by the light of the superior knowledge thus freely given him. The importance of this “advance information” cannot be overestimated, and furnishes us with another reason why Stock Exchanges exist. In 1906, for example, business conditions in this country were the best ever known. Good crops, big earnings, and general optimism prevailed. But Stock Exchange securities did not advance in the last half of the year, because trained financiers began to foresee the first signs of trouble ahead. In the early months of 1907 this knowledge became more general, and a severe decline took place, notwithstanding the fact that the business of the country at large continued to be excellent. “What is the matter with Wall Street?” was the question in the press and on the lips of the uninformed, but Wall Street, or rather the Stock Exchange, was merely fulfilling its function as a barometer and foretelling the coming storm. At the height of the autumn panic, on the other hand, when the press was filled with dire forebodings and the ignorant layman was frightened out of his wits, securities stopped declining and began to rise because the Stock Exchange mind saw that the worst was over. The brightest financial students in the world then began another process of discounting the future; the barometer plainly foretold the end of the disturbance. And all this information--a fundamental law of price movements which indicated clearly when the trouble was coming and when it had ended--was given gratis to the world in the daily published quotations of Stock Exchange securities.