Record Day

The ticker chattered and clucked like a thing gone daft--it tripped itself up and jumpled its furious jargon as if it had an impedient of speech--yet all day long it was slow. When the ticker is even a minute slow it means that an unusually heavy lot of trading is being done. On Friday of last week it was from eight to twenty minutes slow all the time. When the bell rang 2,684,907 shares had been bought and sold--the second largest day's trading in the history of the Stock Exchange, and the highest total since the historic "peace leak" on Dec. 21, 1916, brought a turnover of 3,048,925 shares.

The reasons? Innumerable, interlocked and complicated; partly the successful conclusion of the Locarno Conference (see Page 11), partly the result of extraordinary rumors of an enormous merger in the automobile industry; partly a mechanical culmination of the last feverish weeks--the interest of J. P. Morgan & Co. in U. S. Steel and General Motors; the eagerness of the butcher, the baker, the candlestick maker for over half the stocks listed by the Exchange.

During the day a member's seat was sold at the record price of $126,000.