《股票作手回忆录·第三章·初到纽约·对赌行的赢法为何失灵》第8节
Of course, after a while, I heard a lot of calamity howling and the old stagers said everybody--except themselves--had gone crazy. But everybody except themselves was making money. I knew, of course, there must be a limit to the advances and an end to the crazy buying of A.O.T.--Any Old Thing--and I got bearish. But every time I sold I lost money, and if it hadn’t been that I ran darn quick I’d have lost a heap more. I looked for a break, but I was playing safe--making money when I bought and chipping it out when I sold short--so that I wasn’t profiting by the boom as much as you’d think when you consider how heavily I used to trade, even as a boy. There was one stock that I wasn’t short of, and that was Northern Pacific. My tape reading came in handy. I thought most stocks had been bought to a standstill, but Little Nipper behaved as if it were going still higher. We know now that both the common and the preferred were being steadily absorbed by the Kuhn-Loeb-Harriman combination. Well, I was long a thousand shares of Northern Pacific common, and held it against the advice of everybody in the office. When it got to about 110 I had thirty points profit, and I grabbed it. It made my balance at my brokers’ nearly fifty thousand dollars, the greatest amount of money I had been able to accumulate up to that time. It wasn’t so bad for a chap who had lost every cent trading in that selfsame office a few months before.
注释摘要
这段故事发生在1901年，那是美国金融史上第一次真正意义上的大并购与投机狂潮。当时的背景是，钢铁托拉斯刚刚成立，工业巨头们拿到了巨额的现金收购款，成群结队地涌入华尔街，像一群喝醉的水手一样挥金如土。文中提到的John W. Gates，外号就是“跟你赌一百万”，他代表的这批从实业圈杀进来的资本大鳄，根本不把股价的日常波动放在眼里。而公众呢，正陷入一种被作者…