Part 14

I stared at the last price on the board until I couldn’t see any figures or any board or anything else, for that matter. All I knew was that I wanted to sell Union Pacific and I couldn’t find out why I wanted to.

I must have looked queer, for my friend, who was standing alongside of me, suddenly nudged me and asked, “Hey, what’s the matter?”

“I don’t know,” I answered.

“Going to sleep?” he said.

“No,” I said. “I am not going to sleep. What I am going to do is to sell that stock.” I had always made money following my hunches.

I walked over to a table where there were some blank order pads. My friend followed me. I wrote out an order to sell a thousand Union Pacific at the market and handed it to the manager. He was smiling when I wrote it and when he took it. But when he read the order he stopped smiling and looked at me.

“Is this right?” he asked me. But I just looked at him and he rushed it over to the operator.

“What are you doing?” asked my friend.

“I’m selling it!” I told him.

“Selling what?” he yelled at me. If he was a bull how could I be a bear? Something was wrong.

“A thousand UP.,” I said.

“Why?” he asked me in great excitement.

I shook my head, meaning I had no reason. But he must have thought I’d got a tip, because he took me by the arm and led me outside into the hall, where we could be out of sight and hearing of the other customers and rubbering chairwarmers.

“What did you hear?” he asked me.

He was quite excited. UP. was one of his pets and he was bullish on it because of its earnings and its prospects. But he was willing to take a bear tip on it at second hand.

“Nothing!” I said.

“You didn’t?” He was skeptical and showed it plainly.

“I didn’t hear a thing.”

“Then why in blazes are you selling?”

“I don’t know,” I told him. I spoke gospel truth.

“Oh, come across, Larry,” he said.

He knew it was my habit to know why I traded. I had sold a thousand shares of Union Pacific. I must have a very good reason to sell that much stock in the face of the strong market.

“I don’t know,” I repeated. “I just feel that something is going to happen.”

“What’s going to happen?”

“I don’t know. I can’t give you any reason. All I know is that I want to sell that stock. And I’m going to let ’em have another thousand.”

I walked back into the office and gave an order to sell a second thousand. If I was right in selling the first thousand I ought to have out a little more.

“What could possibly happen?” persisted my friend, who couldn’t make up his mind to follow my lead. If I’d told him that I had heard UP. was going down he’d have sold it without asking me from whom I’d heard it or why. “What could possibly happen?” he asked again.

“A million things could happen. But I can’t promise you that any of them will. I can’t give you any reasons and I can’t tell fortunes,” I told him.