This means that a member must choose his partners carefully, must familiarize himself with what they are doing, and must know how to read every entry on the firm’s books. Then, too, it is immensely satisfactory to one who has been on the floor all day and more or less out of touch with his office details to learn of his own knowledge each day, before he goes home, just where the firm stands. He looks over the customers’ accounts, the loans, and the nature and amount of the firm’s unemployed resources, including its balances at the banks. Such a man sleeps well, and reduces to a minimum the anxieties that, at critical times, make of this a nerve-racking occupation. It is all simple enough, and in the modern methods of office economy in bookkeeping he can do it without loss of time. Above all other considerations, such a man knows his business thoroughly from top to bottom, and he should not think of investing his capital on any other basis. Perhaps a word will not be amiss regarding partnership agreements. A Stock Exchange commission business is one that should be conducted like any other business--that is to say, reserves should be laid aside and surplus balances created for the inevitable rainy day. That this is not done by all brokerage houses in the way it should be done is due to the curious habit that has grown with the years, whereby stockbrokers spend their money, uptown and down, with a lavish hand. Too many men of the younger generation thus give hostages to fortune in their private extravagances by “drawing down” their credit balances as fast as they accrue. “Easy come, easy go,” seems to be the guiding principle, and when hard times come, as come they must, debit balances are created that soon eat into capital account. No hard and fast rule can be laid down to meet conditions like these, but the best method I have seen, and the one most wisely designed to avoid mishaps for beginners, consists in a partnership agreement by which each member of the firm may draw a monthly sum, worked out to meet his normal requirements, _and no more_. All that remains is then turned into capital account, where it draws interest, becomes a producer, and grows by what it feeds on. I have in mind a firm of young men who some years ago resorted to this method of compulsory saving, with such success that, despite the vicissitudes of the passing years, the members comprising it are now all wealthy, attributing their good fortune wholly to this wise and provident copartnership agreement.