What We Learned from This Morning’s Newspaper

3.

The trouble is when they give you only next week’s paper you don’t ordinarily have a chance to make a big killing in the market. I mean stocks don’t generally go up fifty per cent or eighty per cent in just a few trading sessions. The really broad swings take weeks or months to develop. Still and all I figured I could make out all right with the data I had. For one thing there evidently was going to be a pretty healthy rally over the next few days. According to the afternoon edition of the Post that I brought home with me the market had been off seven on the 22nd, closing with the Dow at 803.15, the lowest all year. But the December 1 Times mentioned “`a stunning two-day advance” and the average finished at 831.34 on the 30th. Not bad. Then too I could work on margin and other kinds of leverage to boost my return. We’re going to make a pile out of this I told my wife.

If you can trust that newspaper she said.

I told her not to worry. When we got home from Jerry’s I spread out the Post and the Times in the den and started hunting for stocks that moved up at least ten percent between November 22 and November 30. This is the chart I made up:

Spread your risk Bill I told myself. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket. Even if the newspaper was phony I couldn’t get hurt too badly if I bought all five. So at half past nine the next morning I phoned my broker and told him I wanted to do some buying in the margin account at the opening. He said don’t be in a hurry Bill the market’s in lousy shape. Look at yesterday there were 201 new lows this market’s going to be under 750 by Christmas. You can see from this that he’s an unusual kind of broker since most of them will never try to discourage you from placing an order that’ll bring them a commission. But I said no I’m playing a hunch I want to go all out on this and I put in buys on Levitz Bausch Natomas Disney and EG&G. I used the margin right up to the hilt and then some. Okay I told myself if this works out the way you hope it will you’ve just bought yourself a vacation in Europe and a new Chrysler and a mink for the wife and a lot of other goodies. And if not? If not you just lost yourself a hell of a lot of money Billy boy.