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In the late 1970s, when I was thirsting for a job in journalism, The Wall Street Journal hired me to cover the copper market. My assignment was to get to know the traders who bought and sold copper futures and submit a report on the daily fluctuations. It being an era of high inflation, copper was bullishly inclined, and under my untutored but watchful eye its price increased from 80 cents a pound to 90 cents to, eventually, $1. Promptly I reported (after canvassing my newfound sources) that copper was rising on account of there being “more buyers than sellers.”
“More buyers than sellers!” my editor guffawed. He was a clownish man with a pointed head; he saw humor in everything, in particular his new cub reporter. “Your job is to tell us why there are more buyers than sellers.”
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I didn’t have a following. I kept my business to myself. It was a one-man business, anyhow. It was my head, wasn’t it? Prices either were going the way I doped them out, without any help from friends or partners, or they were going the other way, and nobody could stop them out of kindness to me. I couldn’t see where I needed to tell my business to anybody else. I’ve got friends, of course, but my business has always been the same – a one-man affair. That is why I have always played a lone hand.
As it was, it didn’t take long for the bucket shops to get sore on me for beating them. I’d walk in and plank down my margin, but they’d look at it without making a move to grab it. They’d tell me there was nothing doing. That was the time they got to calling me the Boy Plunger. I had to be changing brokers all the time, going from one bucket shop to another. It got so that I had to give a fictitious name. I’d begin light, only fifteen or twenty shares. At times, when they got suspicious, I’d lose on purpose at first and then sting them proper. Of course after a little while they’d find me too expensive and they’d tell me to take myself and my business elsewhere and not interfere with the owners’ dividends.
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