Word: claytons
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Anderson, Clayton & Co. grew rapidly, taking over gins, branches and business from the defunct firm with which Will Clayton got his start. The firm promoted the round bale (250 Ib.) of uniform consistency which requires only one man to handle it and particularly pleases foreign buyers who deplore the shabby wrapping of the rest of U. S. cotton. Today Anderson, Clayton operate traveling gins in sparsely-settled areas of Mexico, compresses to reduce the size of ordinary gin bales for overseas shipment, warehouses with a capacity of 2,000,000 bales, a barge line on the Ouachita, Mississippi and Warrior...
Like any big cotton merchant, Anderson, Clayton & Co. is always operating on the New York Cotton Exchange. Its operations are so tremendous that it has its own separate member firm, Anderson, Clayton & Fleming. But these operations are solely confined to hedging, which is the reverse of speculation...
Hedging is insurance against price changes. When its warehouses are bulging, a 1?-per-lb. drop in cotton would mean a $10,000,000 loss to Anderson, Clayton if its holdings were not hedged...
Having been pinched occasionally himself, Will Clayton set out in the 1920's to change this rule. His method was to do his own squeezing but to do it so often, so fast and so hard, that cotton men would rise in arms, force the Exchange to modify the rule. His operations are still referred to by those who got burned as nothing less than "fiendish." In the end he won his point, which was to have certain cities in the South designated as "delivery points" instead of the Port of New York alone. This made it easy...
...foreign exchange and local preferences, international cotton merchants have to think, deal, quote in terms of a thousand different kinds of cotton. In the U. S. alone official standards specify 37 different grades on quality, 20 grades on staple length, offering in combinations no less than 740 possibilities. Will Clayton s not only an international cotton merchant but a profound student of economics. When he travels, usually by plane, his brief case is always jammed with earned tracts. What he learns, what he thinks, he can express with clarity...