Chance and Luck

Undoubtedly men have become rich in this way, just as men have become rich on the turf. Where otherwise could it be supposed that all the money which the foolish have lost through listening to the wiles of the craftier sort among stockbrokers, or by betting with bookmakers on horses, has gone to? Where tens of thousands of foolish folk are ruined or lose largely, we may be well assured that hundreds of crafty scoundrels have grown rich. These 'drop off gorged' from the schemes which leave those 'flaccid and drained.' The stockbrokers do not get all the money lost by the foolish cover-speculators. In the typical case I cited the stockbrokers made 106£5s. between them, and the lucky and the unlucky speculators lost between them only 56£5s.; but there I was dealing with, the entirely imaginary case of fair speculation. In actual business cover-speculators inevitably fall, in many of their transactions, into the hands of men akin to the bookmakers in turf gambling, who play with cogged dice. Companies are started which have no chance of success as business schemes, but bring money freely into the hands of those who plan them, or being associates of the gang know how to utilize their knowledge. The prices are run up by means familiar to such men, but of which the unfortunate cover-speculator knows nothing. When the swindling scheme has done its work, and all the conspirators have cleared their profits on the rise in the price of shares, the cover-speculator finds himself moved to buy stock in the manifestly promising and prospering concern. To his disgust, but not at first to his alarm, he finds the price of shares at a standstill or even slightly falling. He holds on for the renewed rise which he feels sure -- trusting in the judgment he imagines he has in such matters, or in information which he supposes to be trustworthy -- will assuredly take place. When the price sinks so as to endanger his deposit, he extends the cover. Presently the bubble explodes, and he finds himself one of the large array of those who have been drained by the rascally promoters.

There are also ways of affecting the price of shares in thoroughly honest concerns by promulgating false rumors; and many a poor wretch, who has complained of fortune frowning when he has seen cover after cover impounded through the fall of shares when he had expected a rise, and vice versa, has been the victim of anything but fortune's assaults; his money has been as deliberately stolen as if his pocket had been picked.

So certain is eventual loss to the cover-speculator that I would endorse the saying of an esteemed friend of mine, a merchant in St. Joseph, Missouri, who when a young man boasted of gaining a large sum by dealing in 'corners in grain' (a system precisely similar to the cover system, only the varying prices of particular kinds of grain, instead of the prices of particular stocks, decide the question of loss or gain), told the lucky gambler that the very best thing he could do with his winnings was to fling them into the Missouri.

In fine, no one has any but the minutest chance of failing to lose largely by cover-speculation -- unless he is prepared to speculate with such knowledge as would make every transaction a villainy.