Current Situation

Business continues to look to the stockmarket for clues of business prospects for the remainder of the year. But the stockmarket refuses to commit itself.

There is, in fact, great difficulty in saying the stockmarket is so-and-so, since it no longer acts as a unit with any degree of consistency. On a day when one group of stocks--e. g., the oils --are strong, another group or groups will be weak. Moreover, within a single group of stocks, there are frequently opposite tendencies in the prices of different stocks.

Of late, the market has been conducted by professional traders rather than by the public. Now the trader can, in the long run, profit only by accumulating shares cheaply and selling out to the public at higher prices; or by selling short at high levels and buying in cheaply later on, when the public is panic-stricken. Both tactics have been tried repeatedly in the past few months; but, although traders have piped, the public refuses to dance. In consequence, the repeated spurts and reactions of highly speculative issues on the Exchange during recent weeks have had, for the, most part, no real significance for the future of trade. Yet the very condition of the stockmarket today-- spotty, inflated in one place and apparently promising in another--is perhaps the market's way of prophesying a similar general condition in U. S. business during the balance of 1925.