《股票作手回忆录·第一章·少年与行情板》第18节
Of course, it was a put-up job. Henry Williams and I together were short six thousand shares of Sugar. That bucket shop had my margin and Henry’s, and there may have been a lot of other Sugar shorts in the office; possibly eight or ten thousand shares in all. Suppose they had $20,000 in Sugar margins. That was enough to pay the shop to thimblerig the market on the New York Stock Exchange and wipe us out. In the old days whenever a bucket shop found itself loaded with too many bulls on a certain stock it was a common practice to get some broker to wash down the price of that particular stock far enough to wipe out all the customers that were long of it. This seldom cost the bucket shop more than a couple of points on a few hundred shares, and they made thousands of dollars. That was what the Cosmopolitan did to get me and Henry Williams and the other Sugar shorts. Their brokers in New York ran up the price to 108. Of course it fell right back, but Henry and a lot of others were wiped out. Whenever there was an unexplained sharp drop which was followed by instant recovery, the newspapers in those days used to call it a bucket-shop drive.
注释摘要
我们来细看这段揭示当年对赌行黑幕的关键文字。这里的主角，拉里·利文斯顿，他在书中的经历其实就是杰西·利弗莫尔本人的化身，由记者埃德温·勒菲弗执笔写成了这本以第一人称叙述的经典。史实和文学加工在这里是融合的：事件的核心真实，但对话和细节描写是小说的笔法，目的是让人物和场景更传神。我们不是在读一本操作手册，而是在看一幅描绘投机心理与市场生态的浮世绘。 首先要理…