The Harlem News

STOCK MARKET GAMBLING
We think we are perfectly safe in saying that the business depression has "scraped bottom" and that the upswing has begun. It is certain that there is a much greater feeling of confidence among manufacturers, business men and bankers than there was a month ago.
The remedial legislation which has been enacted at Washington has already had a deep psychological effect upon the business and financial world. The best proof that these efforts to put a stop to the process of deflation are regarded by men who know about such things as being effective, is the fact that men and institutions of great wealth who have been holding back their funds waiting to be sure that the bottom has been reached, are now actively investing again. But on the heels of these investors follows an army of speculative sharks, whose activities may succeed in undoing the beginnings of restored confidence. These are the traders who rush in whenever the shares of any corporation show signs of strength, and buy merely to sell again as soon as they can make a dollar or two profit.
The New York Stock Exchange is an important institution, in that it furnishes the only open market into which anyone who wants to buy or sell securities can go to make his sales or purchases. But a large part of the trading on the Exchange is pure gambling. These gamblers care nothing about the welfare of the nation; they seek only to line their own pockets. And it is too bad that whenever there are encouraging signs of restored confidence that they should come in and kill it by first running the market up and then, when they sell to take profits, putting it down again.
We believe that these stock gamblers have done more to retard the resumption of normal business than any other one influence. We hope that the nation as a whole will not continue to regard the day-to-day fluctuations of security prices on the Stock Exchange as reflecting anything more than the operations of gamblers, but we are afraid that too many people think the nation's prosperity is dependent upon the price of stocks, which have no more relation to the actual values of the properties behind them today, when they are absurdly low, than they had in 1929, when they were ridiculously too high.