Thursday, October 1, 2009

Making It In The Bucket Shops

By Paul Carlyle

Of course I had my ups and downs, but was a winner on balance. However, the Cosmopolitan people were not satisfied with the awful handicap they had tacked on me, which should have been enough to beat anybody. They tried to double-cross me. They didn't get me. I escaped because of one of my hunches.

The Cosmopolitan, as I said, was my last resort. It was the richest bucket shop in New England, and as a rule they put no limit on a trade. I think I was the heaviest individual trader they had that is, of the steady, every-day customers. They had a fine office and the largest and completest quotation board I have ever seen anywhere.

And the funniest thing was that not later than ten days after the Cosmopolitan people tried to double-cross me a New York operator did them out of over seventy thousand dollars. This man, who was quite a market factor in his day and a member of the New York Stock Exchange, made a great name for himself as a bear during the Bryan panic of '96.

He was forever running up against Stock Exchange rules that kept him from carrying out some of his plans at the expense of his fellow members. One day he figured that there would be no complaints from either the Exchange or the police authorities if he took from the bucket shops of the land some of their ill-gotten gains.

In the instance I speak of he sent thirty-five men to act as customers. They went to the main office and to the bigger branches. On a certain day at a fixed hour the agents all bought as much of a certain stock as the managers would let them.

Just then Dave Wyman by the ticker, began: "Su-" and quick as a flash I slapped my tickets on the counter in front of the clerk and yelled, "Close Sugar!" before Dave had finished calling the price. So, of course, the house had to close my Sugar at the last quotation. What Dave called turned out to be 103 again.

A fellow told me the originator cleaned up seventy thousand dollars net, and his agents made their expenses and then pay besides.

He played that game several times all over the country, punishing the bigger bucket shops of New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cincinnati and St. Louis.

Everybody in the room heard me and began to look toward us and ask what was the trouble, for, you see, while the Cosmopolitan had never laid down, there was no telling, and a run on a bucket shop can start like a run on a bank. If one customer gets suspicious the others follow suit. So Tom looked sulky, but came over and marked my tickets "Closed at 103" and shoved the seven of them over toward me. He sure had a sour face.

Say, the distance from Tom's place to the cashier's cage "wasn't over eight feet. But I hadn't got to the cashier to get my money when Dave Wyman by the ticker yelled excitedly: "Gosh! Sugar, 108!" But it was too late; so I just laughed and called over to Tom, "It didn't work that time, did it, old boy? - 23309

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Understanding Exchange Traded Funds

By Mike Swanson

As of June 2007, SPY ETF has become the largest exchange stock trading fund in the world. It is sponsored by PDR services LLC, which in itself is a subsidiary of American Stock Exchange LLC. It does, however, have some considerable competition on the market. The most formidable ETFs holding stock picks are listed on the New York Stock exchange as IVV, RSP, SH, RSU, SSO, RSW, SDS, UPRO and SPXU.

The ETF (exchange-traded fund) is a way of conducting business on the stock exchange. The value of an ETF is set at the value of the stocks or bonds it represents. This means the value of said assets over the course of the trading day. There are currently 680 active ETFs on the US markets, which are worth about $610 billion.

SPDRs were launched in January 1993 by the Boston asset manager, State Street Global Advisors. They were devised by Nathan Moss, an American Stock exchange executive. In May 1995 they were joined by the MidCap SPDRs. They are now listed on the New York Stock Exchange as "SPY" and as "MDY".

ETFs are routinely criticized for several reasons. First, that they are short-term in scope. Second, they do not provide sufficient diversification. Third, the so called tax advantages are worthless to investors using tax deferred accounts. Fourth, they can be used to manipulate market prices. Most concede that a broadly diversified ETF can be a wise investment.

Their origin lies with the Index Participation Shares (IDSs) of the late 1980s. IDSs were traded on the American Stock Exchange and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange. Eventually the practice was stopped following a lawsuit by the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

Te Toronto Stock Exchange then began to trade its own version of IDS. These proved to be extremely popular, and the American Stock exchange looked for something similar that they could use. The result was the ETF. SPDRs are often referred to as "spiders" or "spyders". - 23309

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