AFTER 15 YEARS

Evening Post, Volume CXX, Issue 140, 10 December 1935, Page 17

AFTER 15 YEARS

STOCK EXCHANGE BUSINESS

After having held office for fifteen years, Mr. G. C. Creagh is resigning from the chairmanship of the Auckland Stock Exchange.

"I feel that the time has come to make room for someone else," said Mr. Creagh on Saturday (reports, the "Auckland Star"). "Fifteen years is a long time." In that time considerable change had taken place in stockbroking, he said. After the war, particularly, the character of the business changed. Whereas at one time the business had consisted largely of mining, today mining held only .. a minor place in the activity of the exchange. .

■ "The investing business has grown out of all recognition," Mr. Creagh said. "The public has become 'share conscious,' so to speak." A great many people were turning to the Stock Exchange to invest their money rather than to real estate and mortgages. "The public has done well out of shares and debentures, on the whole," Mr. Creagh said, "and it is not likely to return to investing the whole of its money as it did formerly."

Mr. Creagh went back to a mining boom that happened some twenty years ago, before he became chairman, and when he had newly joined the Exchange. "I remember the day it broke," he recalled. "We went to the call at 3 p.m., and did not come out till —yes, I think it was after 5 o'clock. At present calls last about half an hour. Everything on the sheet was bought and sold,'whether it was good or bad. Some shares jumped from perhaps 2s 6d to 10s. Thousands changed hands, and kept on changing hands." Towards the later part of the boom calls did not last so long. Unfortunately there was nothing behind the boom. It was simply a rise on paper. Talk of booms led him naturally enough to remember the opposite. Of the depression from which the Exchange in common with the rest of the commercial world is emerging he did not speak, but he went back to the (war. In those years, he said, business was so slack that there were never more than two calls each day, when the normal number is three. Very little business was done, and offices were kept open with difficulty. "But they were kept open," said Mr. Creagh, "and then it was that I realised that stockbrokers were sportsmen and took the bad with a smile as they took the good."

The retiring chairman ended on a more serious note. He gave it as his considered opinion that there was room for a greatly increased mining activity in the Dominion, but to bring this about much greater capital would be needed. There were still mining areas which would repay development which remained untouched, or only partially developed, for want of capital.