Yorkville enquirer. [volume] (Yorkville, S.C.) 1855-2006, 1882-03-02
Mlistellaueuns &eadina,
SPOTS AND FUTURES.
A Humorous View Of Cotton Speculation.

When the heart is full and the brain teens
with sorrows there is nothing so soothing as
cotton. Its chief recommendation is that it
is as clear as MONDAY. There is no painful
tiguringab about it. Railroad Stocks mortgages,
income bonds, construction company shares,
wheat, pork, lard, and other real and trans
ferable things are too complicated for pleasure
and too uncertain for business, unless one gives
his whole mind to them. They are like chess
not recreation but wearying labor. The
dolce far niente of speculation is to be found in
cotton. Nothing could be simpler. Two omin-
utes with your broker does it. The unit is
hundred shares. You take hundred, say,
of ''Septelnber." 1t may be l1.83 or 11.S9,
or anywhere along there-that doesn't mat
ter-the main thing is to get in at something.
The ''margin'' is 50 bale, and your bro
ker's charges, say, S25. The sante," then,
to borrow convenient term from kindred
diversion, is 1925. At this point the sport
begins. You have nothing to do but watch
the tape, the morning and evening papers
through all their editions and extras, the bull
letins and reports of the Department of Agri-
culture, the bulletins from all the Cotton Ex-
changes in the country, the shipping move
ments, ocean freightS, Surats, mill takings,
the weather, the cotton worm, the guano trade.
Of course, you must be already familiar with
the condition of each of these things for every
day of the past five seasons The game is
based almost wholly on comparisons, and to be
a master of the data implies incomplete prep
aration.
This technique is petty, of course, but essen
tial. Before going into cotton one ought to
be able to take the worm and guano statistics,
acreage, condition, forward movement, port
receipts and any good estimate of the probable
size of the ''city crop" at glance, in the
twinkling of an eye, unerringly foretell the
number of bales in the years crop and Incl
dentally it may be added that the ability to
foretell next years crop with equal precision is
a gift of no mean value. Leave "hammering"
to the Cotton Exchange folks and the profess
sional spectators. 1t is their business to
magnify or minimize the crop as their interests
dictate. A speculator who has sold half dozen
coming months is certain that the top crop
and late pickings will show the seasons yield
to be not only abundant but excessive, while
the gentleman who buys is secretly confident
that unprecedented takings for Liverpool and
the Continent coupled with an enormous de-
mand for the New England mills, will prac-
tcally exhaust a crop that is at the very least
million bales short. But the indecent lust
for gain is the ruling passion. Let the anna
teur speculator he content to take the fruit as
it drops into his lap. What can he, with his
puny one hundred bales, do to affect the
market? He would be Quilted at every point,
and in these matters a sense of lnferiority is
humiliating. Hundred bale men should have
some regard for their moral natures and con-
fine themselves to the innocent watching Of
the tape, the bulletins, port receipts, &c.
The perfect ease with which the profit or loss
resulting from the market fluctuations is COM
puted is the supreme charm of cotton specula-
tion. The changes are registered in cents and
hundredths Of a cent per pound. The hun
dredths are called 'points," and on hundred
bale investment each one Of these points repre-
sents $3.50. For instance, some East Haddam
or Glastonbury gentleman, with little mon
ey and plenty of leisure, reads this article and
comes down to take a hand in the pleasing di-
version. He buys, not one hundred, but five
hundred bales, and takes seat by the stick
er." 1t happens to he the afternoon on which
the discovery is made that the cotton crophas
been bought four or five times over by the
speculators, and about 2:30 O'Clock there is a
sudden tumble of say 26 points. The Connec-
ticut amateur hastily does something of this
kind on the back of an envelope 81 5OX5 is
SO 50x26 is S595. Now, as matter Of strict
mathematics, this is ten dollars out of the way,
but the nervous cipherer is never quite respect
full toward the multiplication table besides,
this particular Connecticut gentleman is prob
ably in some worry lest he may miss the last
train for East Haddam. This purely imagi-
nary example illustrates the astonishing ease
with which losses on cotton futures may be
reckOned.
Another winning feature of this fascinating
is the delightful uncertainty about
the cotton you are buying, supposing, ofcourse,
that you leave vulgar "spots" to men who
want cotton to make bags or shirts OF, and
confine yourself to the idyllc futures" 1t is
easy to imagine that one bale of the hundred
may be on an East river wharf, another in the
hold of a coasting steamer. Another IN the
ponderous Jaws of giant compress another
in an Alabama gin house in the seed, and 9TH
ers in the baskets of bent old black men all the
way from Currituck to the Rio Grande. AS a
matter of fact, the cotton is nowhere-except
for the unlucky last buyer who is pinned for
delivery. There are more Southern than
Northern spectators in Futures" and 1t is
said that the South loses in this way the an
nual sum of thirty million dollars. A very |
good rule, so cool headed "operators' say, is
to find out what the Southerners are doing, |
and then do just the other thing. There is no
law to prevent any East 1laddam gentleman
from trying the experiment.-Ne'c York Times.
MAKING FLOUR BY ELECTRICTY.--FlOur
was formerly made by simply grinding wheat
at one operation to the finest possible flour,
and then separating by sieves the flour from
the bran, necessarily grinding in much of the
bran with the flour and discoloring it, while
much of the very best material was separated
with the bran and lost. The latter common
method is to grind very coarsely the wheat
several times, using strong blasts of air be-
tween each grinding to separate the bran from
the granuated interior portion and at last