FEVER RETURNS

Evening Post, Volume CXVI, Issue 21, 25 July 1933, Page 9

FEVER RETURNS

GAMBLING B T STOCKS

WALL STREET MONSTER

(From "The Post's" Representative.) , NEW YOBK, July 5. Wall Street is having another bout of fever. After three and a half years of depression, old gambling habits-are being revived. The stock market is again in high gear, registering 6,000,000 shares in one day. How long will it last? llbw deep will they plunge?. With practically the whole nation leaning on the shoulder of a paternalistic Government, one wontiers if the- time is opportune for playing the- market. But the fever, in its present stage at least, is not so virulent as the 1029 attack.' They are gamming now with cash, where formerly they gambled "on margin," being required to deposit but a fraction of the value of the holding they sought to acquire. A rigorous house-cleaning went during tho period of sober reflection. Bankers may not gamble now with their customers' cash. Insurance and trust companies, public corporations and trading concerns, are controlled lly new stringent "blue sky" laws, aimed at security frauds. Across tho border, in Canada, prominent brokers spent the duration of tho slump in gaol, convicted of practices Ihat were not against the law in the United States. But Washington now frowns on such practices. They must bo wrong if British law says they are wrong. AN UNLEARNT LESSON. Tho small man, who should have learned his lesson in 1929, is coming back on the market. In all British countries, except Canada, he leaves the market alone. It never occurs to him

to play it. But in North America every drug storo clerk and saleslady are as well informed on the trend of stocks as on the form of their individual sport heroes. It is a difference in social complex that will keep Canada, for instance, apart from the rest of tlie Empire. The ticker, geared up during slack years to handle 10,000,000-share days, is metaphorically,'champing the bit while men buy ten shares of this or that sto/.k, -where in 1929 they bought a hundred shares, at four times their present_ value. But gradually they ar« coming to act like inmates' of a nradhouse as they charge about the floor of the .exchange. Figures run, along a line of light, and electric- impulses , flash through the ether to London and tho Continent .as the pace accelerates. Stock prices are not yet shouted on tho sidewalks from ■store fronts. Passengers on Atlantic liners do not cluster about the board as Wall Street prices aro transmitted to them by wireless. But it won't bo long now. The market is getting into its stride. At the moment, for tho small ! speculators, it is only penny stocks, ■ but their eyes are on the leaders. There r will bo iionc to warn them, as the 'turn ,of tho tide of prosperity must not be chncfceiT. To decry the gambling in--1 stinct will bo poor publicity. The tide ebbs m Wall Street. It is there the . eyes of tho nation arc turning.