Wildest Day

Radio seethed at Post 20, boiled its way up 22 1/2 points to close at 297 1/2. Short, stubby, Michael J. ("Mike") Meehan, Radio specialist, rumpled his red hair, blinked behind his glasses. Far away in Chicago, Arthur W. Cutten, bull operator in a dozen stocks, declared Montgomery Ward will reach 1,000. Grey-haired Gen. Oliver B. Bridgman stood at Post 2, noted U. S. Steel transactions in his book. They totaled 160,000 shares.

Indescribable was the confusion. When William Crawford rang the final gong at 3 o'clock, few traders heard it. Exhausted brokers knew it had been a record day, climaxing a record week. They knew they would work all night and all Sunday to catch up. Somehow, the Exchange had managed to turn over 6,641,250 shares of stock in Manhattan's wildest day of speculation.

Into the boiling-pot, traders poured facts, reports, rumors. Among them: P: The Brothers Fisher of Detroit, owning more common stocks than any other U. S. group, will form a billion-dollar investment trust to hold their securities. In Manhattan, the mighty Bankers Trust Co. will help finance the holding company. P: Alfred Emanuel Smith, vacationing in the South (see p. 9), has agreed to head the $50,000,000 bank now being organized by John Jacob Raskob and many another Manhattan capitalist.

P: Merging U. S. oil companies will include Sinclair Consolidated. Potent in the amalgamation will be the Cutten interests, represented in Manhattan by Nephew R. E. Cutten, trader for E. F. Hutton & Co. The new company, brokers heard, will not bear Sinclair's oilscandalous name. P: Stubborn bears drew little comfort from last week's market. They could only pin hopes on bearish theory.

Able theorizer Col. Leonard Porter Ayres of Cleveland, stubbornest bear, again prophesied a market break. Last summer (TIME, July 23) Economist Ayres saw the stockmarket as "a great national bet against the continuation of high interest rates, and since the Federal Reserve authorities can hardly reverse their policies . . . the decision will probably be against the stockmarket with ... a serious decline in stock prices before the end of the year." With only six weeks of the year left, Economist Ayres last week failed to mention the Federal Reserve, was far less emphatic, based his bearish innuendoes on precedent. He noted:

1) Since 1879, there have been 12 bull markets, each lasting about two years. The present bull market has lasted two years.

2) In the 8 years from 1885 to 1892, there were three bull markets in rapid succession. . . . That period resembles the 8-year span from 1921 up through this present year.

Economist Ayres drew deductions, cautiously: "The fact that all bull markets ... in the past 50 years have lasted only about two years does not necessarily indicate that the end ... is to be expected in the immediate future. It is, however, decidedly interesting to note that this present market has now completed its second year of upward movement."