The Birmingham age-herald., 1908-05-24


 Latterly many of the most experienced and alert traders of the stock exchange have either quit altogether for the time being, or else confine their operations to dives in and out, being well content to pass the hours in that way for whatever of a scalping profit they can get out of tie play. A leading trader of piunging proclivities said to the writer day or two ago: T am not on the inside of this market manipulation and am as much at sea to what is going on as the veriest piker.
 My judgment tells me the bull move ment has gone too far, but the market action is convincing evidence that the men in control have the power and ability to put prices where they want them and to make puppets of the whole stock ex- change l feel like fool when I buy and so long as the situation remains as it IS am not going to sell short A man who does that takes his life in his hands Such being the case I for one am going to fold my tent and like the Arab steal away for awhile until matters take more settled form. The market is entirely too feverish and too strictly gambling proposition to suit me-
 How much stock the five men respon- slble for the stupendous manipulation and advance have had to buy during the progress of the campaign cannot be esti- mated, but it must have run up into the millions of shares. The group con- sisted of E. H. Hartman, William Rocke- feller, H. H. Rogers. John D. Archbold and Henry C. Prick, with John D. Rocke- feller in the background buying bales of stock to fortify his position with the various system In which he has been in- terested for years. It Is not understood that the Morgan contingent, the First Na- tional bank crowd or any of the other groups have been progressively active on the buying side, but they have made It easy for the manipulators to obtain funds with which to carry on the campaign. To that extent they have been in sympathy with the movement. In some quarters there is harbored a suspicion that the Nor gan people have been entirely too willing to lend the Hartman faction money, the inference being that the lenders were de- sirous of overlooking the plungers with call money, a proceeding understood to he unfriendly iD the background.
 There is no positive knowledge that the five men named are running the gigantic deal for joint account. or as pool. The belief is that they have some such arrangement, but that each one has been conducting line of spec llation for individual account. It is well known, for instance, that MT. Prick has been in and out of the market on huge scale two or three times. He sold out hundreds of thousands of shares | about month ago and turned very bear ish in ,his talk. That did not last long, however and he got back into the mar
 ket again on his usual Titanic order, Just | where he is now nobody pretends to speak 1 by authority It is one of the sayings | Of the street that MT, Prick makes as | many market mistakes as anybody. Be- 1 ing a whale of first magnitude he makes 1 a big stir in the financial pool when | he gets into action. For that reason
 he always commands an audience. Fewer 1 people seem to know what his associates
 are doing, although on the stock ex-
 change they have a fair idea in a general
 way by keeping watch of tho houses
 through which they distribute their big | Crders.
 The entry of MT. Hartman into the
 Gould game and the simultaneous re-
 entry of John D. Rockefeller into some
 of the Gould properties is not as new q development as most people think II
 came to the knowledge of Mir. Stuyve-
 sant Fish several weeks ago that liar ] riman was buying into Missouri Pacific