Today In Wyoming's History: November 28: 1914 New Your Stock Exchange reopens for the first time since July, when the crises leading up to World War One caused its closer. 1916 ...
This is an interesting item. I hadn't realized that the New York Stock Exchange had been closed from some point in July, 1914, up until November 28, 1914. That's a long time for trading to be suspended.
This is undoubtedly an ignorant question, but if anyone should ever stop here (a rare occurrence, I know) and also be knowledgeable on the the stock exchanges of this period, how did they work? That is, if I was, say, in Casper Wyoming and I wanted to buy stock in a publicly traded company of that period, how would I do it? I presume that I'd need to find a stock broker, and place the order with him, but how we he do it? Telegraph? Telephone? Mail?
2 comments:
As it turns out, the Stock Exchange only opened up for bond trading. Full trading would have to wait until December. And, as I was informed elsewhere, the telegraph provided the main means of sending in purchase requests.
Colin Fenn gave me this answer elsewhere:
Pat,
I would assume that most trades were communicated in much the same way as described in Lefebres' 'Reminiscences of a stock operator'.
Then, as now, the market was heavily compartmentalised. Local brokers offices - bucket shops - offered a ticker tape and price board connected by exchange telegraphs to the local markets in NY, Chicago, London, Liverpool, etc. (They parallel the more respectable spread betting organisations we have today.) They would allow trade on margin and would communicate orders to a dealer on the floor, by the best means they had available at the time; telegraph, telephone and runner.
Faster communications reduced the lag between order and purchase, hence lowered the risk of the broker, so they invested in the best communications they could afford. Nonetheless, the best dealing occurred 'in the street' next to the exchange, so the speculator could communicate with brokers who had members on the stock exchange floor almost directly.
I see that an OCR scan of the book is online now, see:
http://www.trading-naked.com/library/jesse_livermore.pdf
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