Customers' Man

No great Wall Street novel is Customers' Man by Boyden Sparkes, published last week by Frederick A. Stokes Co. ($1.50). But in swift-moving, unadorned narrative style it sets forth a good portrait of a Customers' Man of the Coolidge era. Before publication, the Board of Governors of the New York Stock Exchange had pamphlet copies privately printed for their own reading. To them the subject is especially interesting, for since the Crash of 1929 the Exchange has done much to lessen the evils of which Mr. Sparkes writes. Customers' Man Robert Loomis had a pleasing personality and was an excellent barytone. He stopped his music studies to work in Wall Street when some such strategy was demanded in order to appease the capitalistic father of the girl he wooed. He quickly learned the trade's tricks. "Down here in Wall Street we are all selling the same service at a fixed price. . . . There isn't any competition in price," his boss told him. "What you sell is service-- and personality. Ninety-five percent of all our business is done with friends. Therefore we got to have a lot of friends. . . . We need people who can make friends with the rich." Loomis, with his good voice, went to many parties, made friends with the rich. He learned to make his customers trade as much as possible. On one $1,800 account he bought (and sold) $1,700,000 worth of stock during a year. The account ended the year at $2,000. The firm collected almost $10,000 in commissions. Customers' Man Loomis was, of course, not paid commissions. But he knew his salary would be "adjusted" to the business he brought the firm, that a yearly bonus would be determined on the same scale. One customers' man in the firm had two big accounts, a dummy account for himself and a discretionary account for a customer who was abroad. He would shout "name later" when he gave orders in the morning. If the transaction showed a profit he would put it in his account. This was against rules but the order clerk got a nice slice. Harrison Welch was running a pool and arranged with certain customers' men that they would get $1 a share for every share they sold. Customers' men have short office hours. But their work extends far into the night. Wherever there are rich people there are customers' men, angling for accounts. Lack of interest in the market, stricter rules, the desire of people to trade only on fundamentals, have eliminated many of the worst types of customers' men at present. But Writer Sparkes is not dealing with a vanished race. Many a Wall Streeter will be amused by Customers' Man, many a Main Streeter instructed. Harold Russell ("Night") Ryder, 35, business-getting partner in the defunct brokerage house of Woody & Co. was last week sentenced to not less than three nor more than ten years in prison for grand larceny. He used to say he had $4,000,000 before he was 30, used to call himself "the brightest young man in Wall Street."

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