Word: prices
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Divorced. Vincent Price, 37, Broadway leading man (Victoria Regina, Angel Street) turned silky cinemenace (Laura, The Long Night); by Edith Barrett Williams Price, fortyish, retired stage actress; after ten years of marriage, one child; in Santa Monica, Calif...
...biggest killings are made. Usually only professionals sell short, chiefly because the ordinary investor is vaguely suspicious of the process. Shorts (bears) sell stock which they do not own, hoping that the market will go down and that they can buy the stock later at a lower price. Meanwhile they borrow stock from brokers, sometimes paying a small fee, to turn over to the buyer. Eventually, of course, the short trader has to replace the borrowed stock by actually buying equivalent shares...
...most dangerous market ride is in "puts & calls," which is much like betting that a crapshooter does or doesn't make his point. For as little as $137.50 a speculator may buy a "call," i.e., a 30-day option to buy 100 shares of stock at the price prevailing on the day he bought the call. If the stock rises, he exercises the option and takes his profit. A "put" is the reverse: a trader buys an option to sell stock, cashes in if the price falls. (Both puts & calls are used as hedges to protect paper profits...
...sell on the floor must own Stock Exchange seats, which are currently worth about $68,000 apiece (1929 price: $625,000). Some of the big brokerage houses, like Merrill Lynch, Pierce, Fenner & Beane, own a number of seats, while small houses with only two or three partners (and no branch offices) own only one. Since they work on a commission basis, most brokers were not getting rich until business picked up in this spring's upsurge. (Last year, Merrill Lynch, which did almost 10% of the Exchange business, netted $1,827,952; divided equally among the 81 partners...
Snoop & Jiggle. Though the Street always purrs with "inside information," the days of great market rigging schemes and of pools operated by "insiders" are dead & buried. (In 1929, there were 105 pools in which insiders ran up the price of the stock by buying heavily, then sold to outsiders and left them holding the bag.) The Securities & Exchange Commission keeps too close a watch now for any such shenanigans...