The work of the Stock Exchange

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Monograph

Identifikator:: 1831284952

URN:: urn:nbn:de:zbw-retromon-225876

Document type:: Monograph

Author:: Meeker, James Edward http://d-nb.info/gnd/126597340

Title:: The work of the Stock Exchange

Edition:: Revised edition

Place of publication:: New York

Publisher:: The Ronald Press Company

Year of publication:: [1930]

Scope:: XVI, 720 Seiten; Illustrationen, Diagramme

Digitisation:: 2022

Collection:: Economics Books

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Document type:: Monograph

Structure type:: Chapter

Title:: Chapter V. The dangers and benefits of stock speculation

Collection:: Economics Books

STOCK SPECULATION—DANGERS AND BENEFITS 129 the dealer in sugar. Like the latter, the stock speculator buys and sells at his own risk with the aim of making a profit, and plays a similar part in distributing securities among investors. The fact that the stock market, because of the nature of the property in which it deals, must necessarily serve as a mar- ket for resales, does not alter this function of the speculator as a security distributor. Economic Education and Progress.—Unfortunately, how- aver, the economic education of the public has been very slow, while the evolution of our organized markets, particularly dur- ing the past half-century, has been extraordinarily swift. The paradoxical result is that the general public, although living by means of the economic institutions of today, frequently thinks in terms of an economic America which no longer exists. This is particularly true in respect to the whole general subject of distribution. [n consequence, the public is only too apt to mistake super- ficial and incidental differences between the modern organized exchange and the older and more familiar unorganized type of market for fundamental and basic differences, and to criticize and suspect the former because it does not conform in the details of its operation to the methods customary in the latter. Thus, through ignorance or misunderstanding of the system for clearing contracts in vogue in all the modern exchanges, some appear to think that speculation for small profits which is accompanied by a frequent clearance of intermediate contracts,’ amounts to gambling, because there is no precedent for such a practice in the older unorganized markets. Speculation in securities on the Stock Exchange of today, therefore, must be judged by its conformity in fundamental economic principle rather than in technical mode of operation, with speculation in other and less highly organized markets. Moreover, the actual modus operandi of the present Stock Exchange must be carefully studied before any intelligent con- "4 See Chapter VIII, p. 205.

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