University of Manchester



Reading the Ticker Tape in the Late Nineteenth-Century American MarketPeter KnightWe have become used to hearing the oracular pronouncements of the market’s insistent desires and commands, most often ventriloquized on the nightly news by a mid-level economist at one of the big banks. It comes at times to seem as if the projected and personified authority of the financial markets is dictating events, demanding, for example, a hasty sacrifice from the Greek people in order to appease the inscrutable gods of finance (Jones 2011). But how did the market come to be thought of as a coherent, unified entity, having a life and mind of its own? What difference does thinking of the market in that way make? What role does vernacular financial information play in teaching non-experts to read the market?The idea that the market knows best has become one of the dominant tenets of neoliberalism since the 1980s, underpinned by the Efficient Market Hypothesis that views the market as an omniscient and omnipotent being that cannot be predicted or contradicted (Frank 2000; MacKenzie 2006; Fox 2009). Yet we can trace a longer history of the simultaneous abstraction and personification of the market, and this article makes a contribution to that account. It focuses on the crucial moment of transition in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in the United States, from a literal marketplace that could be observed in its entirety from the Visitors’ Gallery of the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE), to the abstract space of continuous financial activity represented by the newly invented stock ticker. This period saw heated political debates about the morality of stock market speculation, with reformers arguing it was merely a gambling game rigged by elitist insiders who made unwarranted wealth without labour, while defenders insisted that speculation by professional traders performed the socially valuable service of efficiently allocating capital and spreading risk to those more able to shoulder it (Cowing 1965; Fabian 1990; de Goede 2005). Although the actual numbers of Americans holding any type of security was very small (the best estimate is roughly 0.5% of the population by 1910, almost entirely confined to those with substantial means [Ott 2011, p. 17]), nevertheless the stock market was an object of both fear and fascination in popular culture in the last quarter of the nineteenth century (Fraser 2005), not least because of the rapid proliferation of bucket shops across the nation that allowed Americans to participate by proxy in the drama of the stock market (Hochfelder 2005).This article will argue that vernacular versions of economic knowledge were as important as more orthodox forms of financial literacy in making the stock market seem normal to ‘small investors’ (Ott 2011, pp. 9-35). It focuses on emerging ‘genres of the credit economy’ (Poovey 2008) such as investment advice manuals, biographies of Wall Street operators and popular financial journalism and stories. At the same time that these home-spun guides to Wall Street made investing in the market seem legitimate by personalising its abstractions and making it seem homely, they also made financial speculation seem uncanny, more akin to the occult than the rationalisations of economic theory.Reading the TapeThe middle class magazines and novels of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century repeatedly turned to the spectacle of financial panics to illustrate the operations of the market, in part because scenes of ‘frenzied finance’ (Lawson 1905) offer moments of dramatic intensity and sudden reversals of fortune that drive the plot of the story. The image of hysterical speculators on the floor of the Exchange became a familiar visual and narrative shorthand in this period for the transformative nature of financial capitalism as a whole:Figure 1. ‘The Recent Panic Scene in the New York Stock Exchange on the Morning of Friday, May 5th’. Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, May 18, 1893, p. 322. Library of Congress.Finding representational analogues for financial capitalism became increasingly difficult in the last decades of the nineteenth century, however, as the market shifted from the physical location, personalities and embodied dramas of the floor of the New York Stock Exchange or the Chicago Board of Trade to the vast globally interconnected circuits of supply and demand figured in fluctuating stock prices printed on the stock ticker. Although melodramatic scenes from the floor of the stock and commodity exchanges continued to feature regularly in popular representations of the market (Zimmerman 2006), it is striking how often the dramas of Wall Street are illustrated (both visually and verbally) not with noisy scenes of crowds and mass hysteria but with small scale scenes of concentrated reading. Again and again these tales of fortunes won and lost are depicted in their most dramatic moments by scenes of men (and it is nearly always men) poring over the ticker tape that pours into the waste paper basket. The ticker is often the graphic at the heart of the action (fig. 2).Figure 2. W. R. Leigh, illustration for Edwin Lefèvre, ‘The Man Who Won’, McClure’s Magazine, August 1901, p. 363. Harvard College Library.In some cases the picture of tape reading captures the moment that an arch speculator realises that his villainous scheme to corner the market has been foiled; in others, we are meant to see the calm concentration of a heroic Napoleon of finance who is able to apprehend the entire direction of the market from a trance-like study of the tape itself. In both cases, however, the depiction of someone reading the tape acts as a representational proxy for all those readers who would like to be able to see the disembodied market as a whole. The ticker made this possible, after a fashion: each entry on the tape represented a significant trade on the floor of the Exchange, and included the ticker symbol (the abbreviation of the company name), the price and the volume of the transaction. It thus enabled readers to follow all the action in the market from a privileged bird’s-eye viewpoint, and thus to begin to see ‘the market’ in a different way as an abstract geography of a global financescape. The view from the Visitors’ Gallery of the anthropomorphized bulls and the bears battling it out on the floor of the Exchange is thus replaced by the vantage point of a lone individual absorbed in reading the abstract procession of numbers coming over the ticker. The ideal market reader is thus far removed from the scene of action, yet still intimately bound up in its drama through the decoding of the symbols on the tape.We can see many examples of this transformation in economic epistemology towards an abstract and disembodied engagement with the market in Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. It is the semi-fictionalized autobiography of the legendary Wall Street trader Jesse Livermore, ghost-written by Edwin Lefèvre. First published as a series of articles in the Saturday Evening Post, the book is still in print, and continues to be regarded as an inspirational and even a practical guide by the army of amateur online day-traders. Livermore’s is a classic American story of rags-to-riches success. The son of a New England farmer, he left home at fourteen to make his way in the world, with his first job in 1890 chalking up the prices on the quotations board as they came over the wire in a broker’s office in Boston. He began to speculate in bucket shops and then regular brokerages, earning his reputation as the ‘Boy Plunger’. He went on to make and lose several fortunes over the course of his career (see Smitten 2001). Reminiscences of a Stock Operator is a grimly fascinating mixture of self-serving accounts of Livermore’s success (attributed not to luck but skill), liberally sprinkled with advice, axioms and lessons learned. His basic philosophy is that ‘the market never lies’, and in some respects Reminiscences is the classic instruction manual for the ordinary American on how to train the self to the discipline required for learning to decode the endless noise of anonymous and abstract stream of price fluctuations that make up ‘the market’.As a young boy chalking up the quotations on the board he does not think of stock prices as reflecting the underlying value of an individual company or even referring to any actual productive industry, instead seeing them merely as numbers that move up and down in repeatable patterns. The numbers Livermore chalks up are for him entirely abstract, the prices in his mind representing not so much traditional measures of fundamental corporate value as entirely free floating and self-referential signifiers in the endless chain of difference that the ticker churns out: ‘Those quotations did not represent prices of stocks to me, so many dollars per share. They were numbers. Of course, they meant something. They were always changing. It was all I had to be interested in—the changes. Why did they change? I didn’t know. I didn’t care’ (Livermore 1994, p. 9). Unlike the emerging cadre of technical analysts producing charts in the back office of some of the brokers that Livermore knows, his knowledge of price patterns is not achieved by plotting meticulous diagrams. Instead he carries in his head a rough-and-ready sense of the typical movements of individual stocks that allows him to ‘read the tape’ as if it were a novel, or rather, a character in a book. Even when faced with potential ruin later in his career Livermore continues to insist that his campaigns against rival factions in the market are abstracted from the level of petty human concerns:Fiction writers, clergymen and women are fond of alluding to the floor of the Stock Exchange as a boodlers’ battlefield and to Wall Street’s daily business as a fight. It is quite dramatic but utterly misleading. I do not think that my business is strife and contest. I never fight either individuals or speculative cliques. I merely differ in opinion—that is, my reading of basic conditions. What playwrights call battles of business are not fights between human beings. They are merely tests of business vision. (Livermore 1994: 189)For Livermore market activity is not the human-scale drama some other writers in the period perceive, but a contest between rival interpretations of the tape, the objective numbers seemingly far removed from individual passions. In Reminiscences and other ‘modern’ financial advice literature from the turn of the twentieth century such as Ticker magazine (established in 1907 by the financial journalist Richard Wyckoff, writing under the pen name ‘Rollo Tape’), the stated aim is not to gain insider information through personal connections to the powerful cliques supposedly pulling the strings of the market, but to turn one’s self into a recording machine much like the ticker itself, to eliminate emotion and become totally in tune with the mechanical rhythm of the market itself:The Tape Reader evolves himself into an automaton which takes note of a situation, weighs it, decides upon a course and gives an order. There is no quickening of the pulse, no nerves, no hopes or fears. The result produces neither elation nor depression. There is equanimity before, during and after the trade. The Scalper is a bob-tailed car with rattling windows, a jouncing motion and a strong tendency to jump the track. The Tape Reader is like a Pullman coach, which travels smoothly and steadily along the roadbed of the tape, acquiring direction and speed from the market engine, and being influenced by nothing whatever. (Wyckoff 1910, p.16)In these how-to-speculate guides for the common man, predicting market movements is presented as a mixture of practical know-how and hard science, rhetorically reclaiming it as a respectable and democratic form of business activity, free from the taint of immoral and irrational gambling. Speculative finance is thus legitimized because it no longer seems to involve succumbing to animal spirits or a sinful desire to get something for nothing (Lears 2003); instead the speculator is figured as the epitome of cool, detached manliness, influenced by no one, embodying a rational subjectivity whose mastery of the market enables one to attain a sense of individual sovereignty in the age of corporate capitalism. According to these accounts individuals can regain their own economic destiny by predicting the future, not through providential divination or even deep-seated understanding of market fundamentals, but familiarisation with the endogenous fluctuations of prices. According to these guides, speculation is not gambling but informed prediction. Tape reading, one manual asserts, is ‘the science of determining from the tape the immediate trend of prices. It is a method of forecasting, from what appears on the tape now, what is likely to appear in the future’ (Wyckoff 1910, p.10). Far removed from the turmoil of the Exchange, the dispassionate tape reader has a supposedly objective view point that is ironically seen as even more privileged than the insider’s view of a member of the NYSE because it is safely removed from the distracting noise and personalities of the actual traders on the floor of the Exchange. Tape reading, according to these guides for the lay investor, permits a bird’s eye perspective on the sublime vastness of the financial market and the whole economy, with Wyckoff comparing the tape reader to the general manager of a department store overseeing all the information produced by each part of the business, a fantasy of total surveillance, combined with an internal division of labour within the brain of the trader that equates to the reorganisation of the company in the age of managerial capitalism:A Tape Reader is like the manager of a department store; into his office are poured hundreds of reports of sales made the various departments. He notes the general trend of business—whether demand is heavy or light throughout the store, but lends special attention to the lines in which demand is abnormally strong or weak. . . A floor trader who stands in one crowd all day is like the buyer for one department—he sees more quickly than anyone else the demand for that class of goods, but has no way of comparing it to that prevailing in other parts of the store. He may be trading on the long side of Union Pacific, which has a strong upward trend, when suddenly a break in another stock will demoralize the market in Union Pacific, and he will be forced to compete with others who have stocks to sell. The Tape Reader, on the other hand, from his perch at the ticker, enjoys a bird’s eye view of the whole field. When serious weakness develops in any quarter, he is quick to note, weigh and act. (Wyckoff, pp.10-11)The fantasy sketched out in these manuals of tape reading for the lay investor is not just of seeing the financescape as a whole by attuning and disciplining one’s channels of perception to the rhythms of the market, but of becoming the master manipulator of the entire information-processing machine.The Stock TickerAs Preda (2009) has argued, the stock ticker thus contributed to significant shifts in the epistemology and ontology of market society. The ticker was pioneered by Edward Calahan of the American Telegraph Company in 1867, and Thomas Edison produced a more reliable version the in 1869. It was a development of the telegraph, with two wheels that could be controlled automatically; one printed the letter abbreviation of the company whose stock was being traded, and the other the price and volume. Apart from its increased speed and range of transmission, with its automatic printing the ticker was also more economical than the existing electric telegraph, that needed a skilled operator at either end. Prior to the invention of the stock ticker, messenger boys would run from the stock exchange to the neighbouring brokerages in the Wall Street district. With data supplied from the floor of the stock exchange in New York, Boston and the commodity exchanges in Chicago and elsewhere, beginning in the late 1860s tickers were installed in stock brokers offices and even in some private individuals’ offices (see Hochfelder 2006; Preda 2007, pp.113-43). After the turn of the century ticker use mushroomed, with tickers supplying a steady stream of financial and general news not just in legitimate brokers offices but also in bucket shops.The ticker transformed financial information. Prior to the ticker, price quotations were slow, inaccurate, not standardised, and sometimes even forged. Summaries of price quotations that were printed in market circulars were always immediately out of date, and often meaningless because they were given without reference to price variation. Brokers were connected to their customers either in person or by letter. The correspondence often combined personal and business matters, its aim to establish a relationship of trust rather than convey rapidly fluctuating prices. The advent of the ticker, therefore, created a shift in the nature of trust: whereas the status, character and personal connection of the broker had previously conferred authority on market information, people began to place their trust in the impersonal technical accuracy of the ticker machine, and in the professional authority of the emerging networks of brokers, market analysts and exchanges that sought to maintain their monopoly over price data. With the invention of the ticker, the site of speculation was increasingly removed from the face-to-face action on the stock exchange floor, with traders instead adopting a more impersonal engagement with the market as an idealised entity rather than an actual, embodied, physical space in Wall Street.Social studies of finance have advanced the argument that technologies of finance—including the economic models and the practices of market specialists—do not merely provide a better lubrication to the wheels of the market but instead actively shape how those markets develop, how people come to represent those markets, and even the very sense of subjectivity of market participants. In his historical sociology of the establishment of the professional and intellectual boundaries of finance, Preda (2009) argues that the stock ticker cannot be thought of simply as a more efficient way of transmitting price information. It is, rather, a form of socio-technical agency, part of an assemblage of discourses and practices that reconfigured the very market that the ticker is purported to represent more accurately. The ticker, Preda suggests, encouraged an abstract visualisation of the market, coupled with a disciplining of the economic subject into habits of rational calculation and unceasing concentration to the endless flow of prices. The endless flow of price fluctuations on the tape prompted a form of reading the market ‘up close’, followed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the fledgling cottage industry of technical analysis that produced charts enabling a view of the market ‘from afar’. The tape created a new sense of the market as a continuous, uninterrupted flow of rising and falling numbers, instead of a staggered series of private agreements on prices created in the open cry auctions of the exchanges. Whole vocabularies were developed to account for the recurrent patterns that the charts seemed to reveal.These two modes of viewing the market helped crystallise the notion of the market as an abstract, predictable and ordered universe that operated by its own natural laws. This transformation in seeing the market became an important part of the process of making speculation seem legitimate by marking it off from both gambling and insider corruption. Moreover, techniques for reading the ticker and the accompanying charts made the market visible as both a coherent whole and a self-regulating ecosystem. Although the printed marks on the ticker tape and the abstracted charts were in theory a condensed summary of the transactions taking place in the pits of the nation’s exchanges, they were not, Preda insists, merely reflections of a more real market, but in an important sense were the market itself.‘I didn’t like the way Sugar was doing its hesitating’As we have seen, accounts of market reading in middle class fiction and popular investment advice indeed bear out Preda’s thesis that the ticker and technical analysis promoted a new economic ontology that emphasised calculability and abstraction. However, in the remainder of this article I want to show how on closer inspection the mechanised, depersonalised financial imaginary in this period is continually haunted by the glimmerings of a quasi-human intentionality – sometimes conspiratorial, at other times supernatural – behind the invisible hand of impersonal market coordination. Although the guides to tape reading and biographies of traders emphasise the impersonal, objective side of investment, at the same time they also recognise that what the stream of prices printed on the tape reveal is a fundamentally human drama: ‘There is no more interesting or exciting serial story than the stock-ticker tells, from day to day, to those interested in the stock market, or one that often excites more joy or sorrow, or carries with it more weal or woe, prosperity or ruin’ (Clews 2006, p. 159). Many Wall Street writers in this period ruefully acknowledge that the tape’s stories can out-do anything a mere hack can produce. For these writers, the tape is both an encoding of the drama unfolding on the stock exchange floor and a powerful kind of writing in its own right that produces dramatic effects not just in Manhattan’s financial district but throughout the United States and the world. In turn the tape demands a form of reading that is alert to its hidden dramas and to the speculative, fictitious castles in the air—the paper profits and losses—that it records. Although it comes as little surprise that fiction writers such as Lefèvre explore the possibility of reading through the symbols on the tape to the human drama beneath, the same rhetoric of the unmediated transparency of the ticker is also present in the non-fictional genres of investment guides and biographies. For example, Studies in Tape Reading by the financial journalist Richard Wyckoff insists that, despite being physically removed from the action on the floor of the NYSE in order to focus more clearly on the numbers, the tape reader ‘should recognize the turning points of the market; see in his mind’s eye what is happening on the floor’ (Wyckoff 1910, p. 17).Livermore likewise starts off seeing the tape as simply a stream of meaningless numbers, but he soon begins looking for patterns that are not mere statistical abstractions but seem to have a personality to them. He is ‘always looking for the repetitions and parallelisms of behaviour—learning to read the tape’ (Livermore 1994, p. 11). Reading the tape therefore becomes a matter of finding in the endless stream of fluctuating prices not merely numerical repetitions but familiar quirks and tics. Livermore describes how he ‘came to be interested in the behaviour of prices’ (p. 9; emphasis added), as if they were an organism, even an animal, with recognisable intentions: ‘Stock prices were apt to show certain habits, so to speak’ (p. 10). Like others in the period, he compares stock market interpretation to relying on past precedence in horse race gambling, but his point is not that speculation is akin to gambling, but that individual stocks behave like actual horses, with their own recognisable form: ‘I carried the ‘dope sheets’ in my mind. I looked for stock prices to run on form’ (p. 10). Livermore moves beyond simple animism to seeing in the ticker’s symbols the human battle taking place on the exchange floor, with the trader as a general surveying his troops, a familiar image in many of the business hagiographies of the period: ‘A battle goes on in the stock market and the tape is your telescope’ (p. 10). However, he also comes to see the quotations not through the objective and distancing lens of a telescope but with a sixth sense, as if the price variations are alive and their behaviour governed by subliminal laws of nature that only a sensitive trader can uncover:I used to sit by the ticker and call out the quotations for the board boy. The price behaved as I thought it would. It promptly went down a couple of points and paused a little to get its breath before taking another dip. . . Then all of a sudden I didn’t like the way Sugar was doing its hesitating. I began to feel uncomfortable. . . I knew something was wrong somewhere, but I couldn’t spot it exactly. . . According to my dope Sugar should have broken by now. The engine wasn’t hitting right. I had a feeling there was a trap in the neighborhood. At all events, the telegraph instrument was now going like mad. (Lefèvre 1994, pp. 17-18).For Livermore, then, the tape reveals both an intensely human drama (if it can only be decoded in the right way) and a deeper structure that transcends individual human intention, an impersonal and abstract market whose infinitesimal, behavioural quirks and subtle plots can only be discerned in forms of reading that stretch to the limit the pragmatic, quasi-scientific advice in the manuals. In the way that Livermore presents it, it is not the behaviour of investors that makes the price of Sugar hesitate: the price itself seems to have a personality all of its own, just as the legal doctrine of corporate personhood granted to the vast, inhuman corporations some of the same rights as individuals (see Michaels 1987; Marchand 1998; Nace 2005). Likewise the market may be a machine, but it has a soul, and only a savvy mechanic who knows its foibles can recognise when something is amiss.Invisible HandsPreda (2009) argues that the advent of the stock ticker shifted the focus away from the human dramas of Wall Street cliques towards the anonymous procession of fluctuating numbers of the tape. Yet not only did there remain an obsession with the nefarious or heroic schemes of Wall Street insiders in the muckraking and hagiographic literature of the period, but the numerical abstractions and even the ticker itself were figured through the rhetoric of personification. Imbuing the market with a sense of intentionality, agency and personality has a long history. The market has often been figured as feminine, most obviously in the guise of the goddess Fortuna or Lady Credit (Pocock 1975; de Goede 2005), while Adam Smith’s trope of the Invisible Hand of market co-ordination draws on a longer tradition of providential and theatrical metaphors (see Taylor 2004, pp. 77-89; Zimmerman 2006, p. 131; Ahmad 1990). There is also a long tradition of seeing the work of Wall Street in animistic or anthropomorphised terms, in particular the commonplace division of the market into Bulls and Bears and the Lambs of the unwitting public (Burns 1999; Crosthwaite et al. 2013). Around the turn of the twentieth century the ticker, I want to suggest, functioned in the financial imaginary as the literal embodiment of the invisible hand of the market, a mundane incarnation of the ineffable presence of the market itself. In Slavoj ?i?ek’s terms, the Invisible Hand of the market is one of many versions of the ‘big Other’, the ‘mysterious spectral agency’ that is called into being to provide symbolic grounding for popular understandings of why history unfolds as it does (other contenders are divine Providence, the Marxist objective logic of History, and the myth of an all-encompassing Jewish conspiracy). The image of the Invisible Hand arises, ?i?ek contends, when capitalism ‘engenders its own form of anonymous Destiny in the guise of market relations’ (?i?ek 1999, p. 339).Again and again we hear in these Wall Street stories, biographies and manuals the ticker itself speaking, sometimes loudly, at others in a seductive whisper: ‘he could almost hear the stock shouting, articulately: “I’m going up, right away, right away!”’ (Lefèvre 2008, p. 119). It becomes a case not so much of struggling to read the market through the arcane symbols on the tape, as listening to the ventriloquising voice of the market itself speak in insistent tones. The ‘most expert type of tape-reader’, we are told, ‘carries no memorandums, and seldom refers to fluctuation records. The tape whispers to him, talks to him, and, as Mr Lawson [a notorious speculator-turned-novelist active in the 1900s] puts it, “screams” at him’ (The Ticker, p. 34). However, for all its seeming urgency, without an interpreter or a medium ‘the loquacious tape’ (Lefèvre 2008, p. 60) can end up merely speaking nothing but itself, the intentions of the market left frustratingly inscrutable. The repeated refrain of the ticker that demands attention in several of Lefèvre’s stories is: “‘Ticky-ticky-ticky-tick,” said the ticker’ (Lefèvre 2008, p. 7).If the stock ticker ventriloquises the market in a general way, it is also itself repeatedly personified. Despite his talk of the speculator needing to develop an attitude of scientific detachment, Livermore, for example, comes to see the ticker machine as a fickle tipster, at times friendly and at others treacherous:The ticker beat me by lagging so far behind the market. I was accustomed to regarding the tape as the best little friend I had because I bet according to what it told me. But this time the tape double-crossed me. The divergence between the printed and the actual prices undid me. (Lefèvre 1994, p. 42)In Lefèvre’s stories the speculators internalise the abstractions of price variation arriving over the tape, becoming in the process hypnotised mouthpieces for the anonymous market. But then in turn they project onto the ticker their own desires and fears:The very ticker sounded mirthful; its clicking told of golden jokes . . . At times their fingers clutched the air happily, as if they actually felt the good money the ticker was presenting to them. . . Their dreams were rudely shattered; the fast horses some had all but bought joined the steam-yachts others had almost chartered. . . And the demolisher of dreams and dwellings was the ticker, that instead of golden jokes, was now clicking financial death. They could not take their eyes from the board before them. Their own ruin, told in mournful numbers by the little machine, fascinated them. . . Wilson, the dry goods man . . . was now watching, as if under a hypnotic spell, the lips of the man who sat on the high stool beside the ticker and called out the prices to the quotation boy. Now and again Wilson’s own lips made curious grimaces, as if speaking to himself. (Lefèvre 2008, p. 96-98)When the mesmerised speculator Wilson mutters to himself, it begins to seem as if his lips are not under his conscious control. Self and market have begun to blur in an image of uncanny, supernatural possession.For numerous commentators in this period the trader’s trader is James R. Keene, the epitome of ruthless market manipulation who became the hired henchman for Standard Oil. For all his detached, masterly control of the market, he is at times nevertheless described as being merely its mouthpiece. He is characterised as the ‘high priest of the ticker’ (Wyckoff 1910, p. 8), who has the uncanny ability to become completely attuned to the rhythm of the market, his scrutiny of the tape ‘so intense that he appeared to be in a trance while mental processes were being worked out’ (Lefèvre 1902, p. 91). We learn that ‘his most characteristic attitude is standing by the ticker, one elbow leaning on a corner of the high ticker stand, his cheek resting against his closed fist, his eyes fastened on the narrow paper ribbon that tells the story of a “Keene market”’. He is totally in control of himself and the market, and yet also subsumed into the market’s rhythms, as he ‘stands there immobile, his heart-beats attuned to the clicks of the ticker, pausing in his scrutiny of the tape only long enough to send an order to a lieutenant, buying here, selling there, playing a scientific game of chess with his invariable opponent—human greed’ (Lefèvre 1902, p. 92).Scholars of late nineteenth-century Anglo-American culture have shown how the period’s fascination with psychic phenomena coupled both archaic and scientific elements. Spiritualism, mesmerism and telepathy, for example, promised intimacy with distant, otherworldly interlocutors, with these mystical practices viewed as fully compatible with modern technologies of communication such as the wireless telegraph and invisible forces such as radiation (Thurschwell 2001; Otis 2001; Luckhurst 2002; Menke 2008). Likewise cultural historians (e.g. Seltzer 1992) have shown the confusions that arose not only from machines beginning to seem more like human, but people coming to act more like machines. On the one hand, traders such as Livermore and Keene are presented as embodying scientific and economic rationality, able to make dispassionate calculations and becoming machine-like in their reading of the tape. On the other hand, they are described as being hypnotised by the tape, entering into a divine communion with the ‘mysterious spectral agency’ of the market. Their reading allows them to possess the secrets of the market, but in turn they are possessed by its inscrutable forces. Likewise the stock ticker itself becomes the prophet of profit, a mouthpiece for the sublime and inscrutable divinity of the market in its entirety: ‘There was no god but the ticker, and the brokers were its prophets!’ (Lefèvre 2008, p. 195).If tape reading and the speculation it enables are presented as modern, technical and objective, they are thus also described by Livermore, Wyckoff and other writers of popular market tracts in terms of intuition and something approaching mystical divination. Like a clairvoyant, the ticker mysteriously seems to detect anticipations of the future through fluctuations in the prices themselves. Far from being a mere unfeeling machine, it is a sensitive medium picking up in advance on the movements of human history that elude conscious apprehension:The tape tells the news minutes, hours and days before the news tickers, or newspapers, and before it can become current gossip. Everything from a foreign war to the passing of a dividend; from a Supreme Court decision to the ravages of the boll-weevil is reflected primarily on the tape. (Wyckoff 1910, p. 11)As we have seen, the adept reader of the tape merges his self with the ticker, which in turn becomes fused with the market itself, which in turn incorporates not only the entirety of history but all the future too.Livermore insists that his analysis of the direction of the market as a whole is merely the application of an astute appraisal, not of the underlying herd psychology of investors, but the behavioural oddities of the price quotations themselves. Based on his observation that ‘there is nothing new in Wall Street’ (Lefèvre 1994, p. 10), Livermore’s trading strategy is to identify endogenous rather than exogenous factors in market movements. Yet his approach is not merely to ignore insider tips or pronouncements on economic fundamentals in favour of an autodidactic version of technical analysis; nor is it to double-guess the irrational behaviour of fellow investors. For Livermore and other vernacular financial analysts the market is instead is a sensitive barometer of all of these external and internal influences, and the trick is to turn oneself into a finely calibrated register that can pick up on its uncanny signals.It is therefore significant that many of the pivotal moments in Livermore’s route to riches are the result not of objective analysis of economic indicators or price patterns, but of hunches and a ‘curious feeling’ of intuition (Lefèvre 1994, p. 72) that he finds hard to explain. The public not surprisingly latch onto these market coups as evidence of his special genius, in which the credentialed expertise of financial elites is outclassed by the supernatural powers of the self-taught ‘Boy Plunger’. Livermore recounts the following story, for example. It is 1906, and he is taking a short vacation in Atlantic City, having sold out all his market positions for a while. Bored of taking the sea air, he goes to a branch of his brokers in the town out of curiosity, without any intention of getting back into the market. The market is generally bullish, but Livermore’s attention is suddenly grabbed by Union Pacific:I got a feeling that I ought to sell it. I can’t tell you more. I just felt like selling it. I asked myself why I should feel like that, and I couldn’t find any reason whatever for going short of UP. (Lefèvre 1994, 73)The friend who is with him is alarmed to see that Livermore starts short selling Union Pacific, an illogical act in a market that is rising. Livermore can only explain that ‘The urge was so strong I sold another thousand [shares]’ (77). The next day news arrives of the San Francisco earthquake. Ironically, Livermore’s inexplicable hunch about Union Pacific shares going to fall would in theory have been right, but he is annoyed to find that the Street doesn’t send the prices tumbling in a way that they should: ‘I was short five thousand shares. The blow had fallen, but my stock hadn’t. My hunch was of the first water, but my bank account wasn’t growing; not even on paper’ (77). There are two inexplicable things in play here. For Livermore the conundrum is that the market does not react to the news in the way he thinks it should. But the other more profound mystery is that Livermore has a market hunch that anticipates a completely unexpected and unpredictable event.In the book he tries to give some explanations along the way, mentioning, for example, how some friends try to tell him that:it isn’t a hunch but the subconscious mind, which is the creative mind, at work. That is the mind which makes artists do things without their knowing how they came to do them. Perhaps with me it was the cumulative effect of a lot of little things individually insignificant but collectively powerful . . . I can’t tell you what the cause or motive for my hunches may be. (Lefèvre 1994, 76)The idea of prediction as a form of subconscious sensitivity to the subtle cues of the market as a whole fits in with Livermore’s presentation of stock operating as an art rather than a strictly mechanical science, but of course it still does not explain in any coherent, rational way how he could have possibly picked up in advance on subliminal signals through his reading of the tape that there was going to be an earthquake in San Francisco. Livermore thus seems to suggest that unexpected extra-market events are anticipated in some manner by price fluctuations that only a true adept can detect. Livermore thus argues that his method of prediction allows him to take account of unexpected events through his uncanny sensitivity to the seismological fluctuation of market prices:And right here I will say that, though I do not give it as a mathematical certainty or as an axiom of speculation, my experience has been that accidents—that is, the unexpected or unforeseen—have always helped me in my market position whenever the latter has been based upon my determination of the line of least resistance. . . . You will find in actual practice that if you trade as I have indicated any important piece of news . . . is usually in harmony with the line of least resistance. The trend has been established before the news is published. (Lefèvre 1994, 124)Here Livermore seems to anticipate a super-strong version of the EMH, in which all knowable information—including future possibilities—has already been discounted in the price of securities. Yet the example of the San Francisco earthquake takes this idea to its metaphysical extreme, with the possibility that somehow the prices recorded on the ticker can even offer ghostly foretellings of the inherently unpredictable future.The market is thus no longer the plaything of individual master-manipulators, or a machine that ticks along under its own steam, or even the aggregation of the irrational and imitative behaviour of the herd. Instead the market for Livermore is figured as partly an extension of his own mind that is in tune with the cosmic ‘harmonies’; partly an all-encompassing organism; and partly a mystical text in which the future is already written. Prediction thus becomes more akin to fin-de-siècle spiritualist attunement to the other-worldly whispers of the deceased than the rationalised projection of future price movements proposed by either the chartists or the fundamentalists. For all that Livermore insists on working alone and never listening to the crowd (the only time he suffers a major reverse of fortunes is when he takes on a partner), his success is based on the ability of his mind to be so receptive to the vibrations of the market and so in tune with the desires of the crowd recorded on the tape that his very identity as the sovereign self of neoclassical economics is undermined.As much as the tape is reckoned in the vernacular economic writings of the period to offer a reflection of the sublime vastness of the economy itself, it thus also functions as a projection of self, blurring the boundary between the representation and the interpretation. Through the tape’s constant updating, the market is frequently figured as a barometer of people’s feelings, a financial version of the meteorological pathetic fallacy (but of course it is also simultaneously the cause of those feelings: see Jaffe 2010). In Lefèvre’s story ‘The Tipster’, for example, the question ‘How’s the market?’ comes to replace the greeting ‘How are you doing?’, with the speculation-crazed denizens of Wall Street feeling a complete identification with the market. In Lefèvre’s stories there is a convergence between the self and the ticker, as people’s hearts beat with the ‘pulse of the stock market’ (Lefèvre 2008, p. 51):He had imagined he knew the market. . . And as time passed the grip of Wall Street on his soul grew stronger until it strangled all other aspirations. He could talk, think, dream of nothing but stocks. He could not read the newspapers without thinking how the market would ‘take’ the news contained therein. (p. 101)One man, suffering from ‘ticker-fever’ becomes like a telegraphic medium inhabited by the electrical impulses of the tape: ‘he shook his right forefinger with a hammering motion’, and, ‘little by little Gilmartin’s whisper set in motion within him the wheels of a ticker that printed on his day-dreams the mark of a dollar’ (Lefèvre 2008, pp. 103, 107, 106). Unlike the telegraph with the all-too-human hand of its operator, the automatic printing wheels of the stock ticker at the receiving end thus conjured up for Wall Street commentators the idea of the ticking machine in the corner of the office as a disembodied writer, an automaton tapping out the story of the market.Conclusion: The Ghost in the MachineThe market for securities expanded rapidly in the first quarter of the twentieth century, with a quarter of Americans owning shares by 1929 (Ott 2011, p. 229n2); the New Deal financial reforms enacted in the wake of the Wall Street Crash were thus designed to protect ordinary investors rather than attack the very idea of popular stock market participation. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the mechanical regularity of the stock ticker and the growth of technical analysis helped popularise the idea of the market as an impersonal aggregation of countless transactions whose patterns could be uncovered and, if not predicted, then detected after the fact. Public relations campaigns on behalf on the NYSE, together with the patriotic embrace of the securities market in the form of Liberty Bonds, and the slow adoption of legal requirements for increased transparency of corporate financial reporting and improvements in corporate governance, contributed to the public acceptance of the goal of a shareholders’ democracy. These emerging discourses, technologies and practices helped undermine an older critique of speculation as a rigged game of Wall Street cliques and insiders.The influence of vernacular genres of financial knowledge such as investment advice manuals, biographies of traders and popular fiction has, however, tended to be overlooked in accounts of the development of the Anglo-American securities market. Even Preda’s (2009) path breaking account of the historical ‘agencement’ of finance is concerned more with the respectable efforts by early chartists to stake out a claim to specialised and professional knowledges than with the questionable investment advice targeted at autodidacts, the forerunners of today’s day traders. The forms of vernacular finance I have been examining in this article contributed to the popular acceptance and normalisation of finance, in part by making its abstractions more tangible and personal, not least with the depiction of the market having a mind of its own. By making stock market activity seem rational, normal and a skill that could be learned by studying a cheap magazine or emulating fictional portraits, the genre of popular investment advice manuals held out the promise of teaching non-expert ‘outsiders’ how to profit from speculation as much as ‘insiders’, albeit not always with great success. Some of the investment advice was nothing more than platitudes and vague generalisation; some was factually mistaken; and some was outright fraudulent. Over and above the specific tips and tricks they offered, these genres of grassroots finance taught their lay readers to think of the stock market as a coherent text, that could be made democratically accessible by a self-taught tape reader. Yet, as we have seen, as much as popular accounts of Wall Street normalised the operations of the market, they also conjured up some of the strangeness of high finance, its hypnotising promises, fictitious profits, and uncanny personifications.ReferencesAhmad, Syed. (1990) ‘Adam Smith’s Four Invisible Hands’, History of Political Economy, vol. 22, pp. 137-44.Burns, Sarah. (1999) ‘Party Animals: William Holbrook Beard, Thomas Nast, and the Bears of Wall Street’, American Art Journal, vol. 30, pp. 9-35.Cassidy, John. (2009) How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamity, New York, Farrar, Straus & Giroux.Clews, Henry. (2006 [1908]) Fifty Years in Wall Street, New York, John Wiley.Cowing, Cedric. (1965) Populists, Plungers, and Progressives: A Social History of Stock and Commodity Speculation, 1890-1936, Princeton, Princeton University Press.Crosthwaite, Paul, Knight, Peter & Marsh, Nicky. 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