Let these two propositions (which any reputable banker or broker will tell you are axiomatic) be considered separately. There is no virtue in the word "guarantee." If this simple fact could have been firmly fixed in the minds of the small investors of this country they would have been saved the loss of millions of dollars since our present period of wonderful prosperity began. In these days of highly perfected business organization the process of finding out the responsibility of any financial or business concern has been reduced to an exact science and made available to all. Is it reasonable to suppose, under these conditions, that any company or corporation which cannot stand on its own feet can get any responsible concern to guarantee its bonds or other so-called securities? Never! Such a supposition is absurd on the face of it, and an instance where it has been done is not, so far as is known, to be found in actual practice. Dig down under the "guarantee" of the company which asks you to invest your savings and what do you find? That if you do invest you and your fellow victims are really your own guarantors; that the financial strength of the concern is really the money which you and your associates pour into it; that its only financial life blood comes from the purses of the small investors, and that when the stream of vitality from this source begins to dry up, the services of the financial undertaker are in near and inevitable demand. Reduced to its last analysis, the blacktype declaration of a "guarantee" in the literature of the "get-rich-quick" concern simply means that it has something to sell you. Generally, it is also an invitation to you to pay in advance for the flowers to adorn your own financial funeral. As to the other pet phrase, "highest market value," or market value of any kind, for that matter, a very few words will suggest the situation: Excepting where a very large demand meets an insufficient supply in a free, open and comparatively unmanipulated market, where sales are regularly made of record and those records command the respect and confidence of the legitimate financial public, there is no "market value" save that which is arbitrarily made by the broker. He is the market; he makes the price by the simple process of "thumbs up" or "thumbs down." The man who is on the "sucker" list of a wildcat concern receives an announcement that "all indications point to the conclusion that next week the stock of the Honor Bright Company will sell at not less than five points advance of the present price." The next week he gets notice that the prediction of an advance had proved true. If he is unsophisticated enough he receives the announcement with solemn credulity and credits the author of the promotion literature with great acumen and shrewd prophetic powers. He figures up the profits he would have made on the advance and condemns himself for not heeding the "confidential" advice to "buy quick."