204 THE WORK OF THE STOCK EXCHANGE
are reached, speed and agility are relied upon to do the rest. Age can-
not wither, nor custom stale, his infinite variety. He is a bull one
minute, and a bear the next. He is intent, resourceful, suspicious,
vigilant, and ubiquitous. He asks no quarter, and gives none. Now
he is sphinx-like, deaf, inscrutable and impenetrable; now exploding
with the frenzy of battle. You may stand and chat with him, and he
may seem to listen to you. In reality he does not hear you at all. His
roving eye is elsewhere, his mind is intent on other things. In the
middle of a sentence he may leave you abruptly and go tearing from
crowd to crowd like a thing possessed, the incarnation of energy.
From the nature of his business the floor trader does not
usually need to maintain an elaborate office. Often, indeed, the
floor trader simply hires desk room in some commission office.
For the same reason he usually clears his transactions through
some commission house instead of attempting to handle the
work of clearance through an office and with employees of his
own. In such an event his purchases and sales of stock are
consequently entered on the clearance sheet of that commission
broker, along with the latter’s transactions.’ Usually, there-
fore, in making contracts for the delivery or receipt of stock
on the floor, the floor trader “gives up” the name of this clear-
ing member rather than his own. In return for the responsi-
bility and labor assumed by the clearing member, the floor
trader pays him a clearance fee of $1 or upwards per 100 shares
nf stock cleared.
The Floor Trader’s Economic Services.—The floor trader
regularly performs two important economic services. For one
thing, his speculative purchases and sales are of great assistance
in maintaining a continuous market. As we have seen, they
fill gaps which would inevitably occur in a purely broker’s
market. The floor trader’s operations consequently serve as
one of the means of imparting instant negotiability to all the
Exchange’s listed securities.
In the second place, he is of an even greater significance in
stabilizing prices. As a matter of fact, the floor trader’s best
3 See Chapter XII. p. 328.
