'In the early 1930s, I worked with my brother at the midtown branch of a small brokerage firm. The stock market had been battered to unheard-of lows, but the big spotlight was on banks. People were lining up for their money. Failures were beginning to spread.
In an attempt to quell rumors of a bank holiday, Governor Lehman of New York pledged that he would never close the banks. In state after state, other officials made similar vows.
Then, just a few months later, they turned around and did exactly what they said they would never do: One by one, they closed down the banks in their state. Confidence was shaken still further.
We decided to track the banking crisis more closely. We figured the money must be going somewhere. But where?
Soon we discovered the obvious: If people are taking their money out of the banks, it must show up in the ?currency in circulation.? That was one of the statistics tracked weekly by the Federal Reserve. And it was readily available for the asking.
Currency in circulation is the cash you carry in your pockets. But back then, most of it wasn?t circulating at all. People were taking their money out of the banks and burying it in their back yards or stashing it under the mattress. It was dead money.
So ?currency in circulation? became our number one indicator of the banking crisis. Every Friday morning, we got the figures from the newspaper and plotted them on a graph.
In late 1930, it was climbing at a pretty steady clip. Then, the bank withdrawals accelerated and the line on our chart began to rise more rapidly. We sensed that the banking crisis was approaching a climax.
President-elect Roosevelt was to be inaugurated in a few weeks. He would have to do something dramatic to stop the cash hemorrhaging from the banks. As inauguration day approached, my brother and I began to speculate that Roosevelt might declare a bank holiday. But we needed solid confirmation.
So on Thursday afternoon, March 2, 1933, two days before FDR was to be inaugurated, we decided not to wait for the morning paper to get the latest from the Fed. Instead, we took the downtown express to the New York Fed?s offices on Liberty Street to get the number in person, as soon as it was released.
The only people waiting in line at the Fed were a few messengers from the newspapers and some banks. Virtually no one else was interested in the currency in circulation. When we saw the number, we were shocked!
It had surged far beyond anything we had imagined. That was Thursday night. Roosevelt?s inauguration was going to be Saturday morning. We went home, plotted it on the chart and planned our strategy.
Al said: ?This is it! This is the end of the whole decline! Roosevelt is going to have to do something about this.? I agreed.
Most people might think that a bank holiday ? easily the worst financial crisis in modern history ? would be the harbinger of a further stock market decline and a signal to sell.
We felt it was exactly the opposite. We believed that it was the climax of the whole deflation since 1929. The new President would have no choice but to close the banks, inflate the economy and pump up the stock market. Besides, at these low prices, major blue chips had great value. We had no intention of selling short. Our sole purpose was to buy.
The next morning, we went straight to our firm?s main offices downtown. We didn?t stop at the midtown branch. We wanted to get our orders in to the man who talked directly to the floor traders.
We bought everything we could lay our hands on. We bought GM, AT&T, GE and Sears for pennies on the dollar. The tape barely moved, it was so dead. No more than 350-400 thousand shares of stock were traded. That?s less than trades in just one large transaction today. But that didn?t stop us. We just kept right on buying.
The order clerk looked at us as if we were from another world. ?How come you guys are buying?? he asked. ?You?re the only ones!?
We smiled and shrugged. It was none of his business. By the time the day was out, we had bought thousands of shares of stock for ourselves and for our clients, at bargain basement prices. As a matter of fact, they were just about the lowest they had fallen in the entire century.
The next day, Roosevelt was inaugurated. Immediately, he announced that he was closing not only the banks, but also the financial markets. All the stock exchanges shut down. There was no trading. Everything was frozen. So if you owned stock, it was impossible to sell. If you didn?t own stock, it was impossible to buy.
Investors wondered: ?Is this the end?? ? ?Will the markets ever re-open again?? ? ?Is there going to be another crash?? Even at such low levels, people were afraid the market could fall a lot further.
But as we approached the end of the banking holiday, sentiment began to change. Confidence in the banking system recovered. Well-heeled investors made plans to start buying some stocks.
When the stock market finally reopened, prices jumped up. There was a big gap between the closing prices before the holiday and the opening prices after the holiday. So it was too late to get in at the best prices.
However, since we got in ahead of time, we were in great shape. And because we had bought the stocks on margin, our profits were huge. '
http://www.moneyandmarkets.com/...iumph-of-contrarian-investing-48652 ----------- 'Being a contrarian is tough, lonely and generally right'
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