Prince of the Pennies

When the business editor of the old Toronto World was fired for turning up tipsy one evening in 1910, the managing editor drafted his new secretary to put out the financial page. For the 22-year-old secretary, Arthur J. Trebilcock, the business editor's last lapse marked the first lap in a long financial career that reached its climax last week. After 20 years of running the Toronto Stock Exchange as executive manager, onetime Newsman Trebilcock, 67, became its first full-time paid president.

As boss of Bay Street, the Wall Street of Canada, Trebilcock runs the world's fastest-growing stock exchange. Since 1951, a succession of booms in industrial stocks, base metals, oil and uranium has turned Toronto into a speculator's mecca--and a broker's madhouse. Though the Toronto Exchange has less than half as much floor space (9,000 sq. ft.) and fewer than one-tenth as many members (109) as the giant New York Stock Exchange, 67% more shares were traded there in 1955 than on New York's Big Board. Many days the ticker trailed the trading by as much as ten minutes (record: 45 minutes); many nights brokers' staffs worked around the clock to clear the decks for the next day's avalanche of orders from investors in Canadian and U.S. cities to which the Toronto Exchange is linked by more than 310 tickers. The upsurge in business has sent the price of exchange seats soaring to $125,000, well above the $113,000 paid for a seat last week on the New York Stock Exchange.

Second Place. Last month, with an average daily volume of more than 10 million shares, the Toronto Stock Exchange repeatedly set new peaks: 208,086,000 shares changed hands in the 20-day trading period, v. New York's alltime record of 141,668,410 shares in the black days of October 1929 that ushered in the Depression, While Toronto's dollar volume in 1955 ($2,699,008,896) lagged far behind New York's $32,830,837,681, it pushed slightly ahead of Manhattan's American Stock Exchange ($2,657,015,518) for the first time.

The bustle on Bay Street is the result of Canada's long-lived boom in speculative oil and mining issues that sell for a few cents to a quarter a share. Of the 1.5 billion shares traded in Toronto last year (more than double the 1954 record), all but 30 million were in stocks that sold for less than $25. Average price per listed share on the Toronto Exchange: $2.26 v. New York's average $55.04.

This year speculators who gambled on rising copper prices made even fatter killings than they had in the uranium boom a year ago. New Jaculet, one copper prospect that sold for as little as 13-c- last year, soared to $2.15 in April. In twelve months Opemiska went from $3.75 to $19.50; Consolidated Halliwell shot from 44-c- to $3.75 this year. Brokers, also, have made record profits this year--and, like all Canadians, pay no capital-gains taxes on their market profits.

On to Toronto Street. While Canada's ore-rich economy has surged irrepressibly ahead since World War II, the boom might have bypassed Bay Street if President Trebilcock had never ventured, via the World, into a financial career. After working up to business editor, he quit to study mining law, later hung his shingle over a tent at Red Lake camp in Ontario's 1925 gold rush. On his return to Toronto, Trebilcock was appointed counsel to the old Standard Stock and Mining Exchange, Canada's key mining market; in 1934 he worked out a merger with its rival, the 104-year-old Toronto Stock Exchange. The concentration of trading power soon pushed Toronto ahead of Montreal, which had traditionally been Canada's financial capital. By 1937, trading volume was so heavy (451 million shares) that the cramped Toronto Exchange had to move to new quarters on Bay Street. Planned by Trebilcock, the new exchange was Canada's first completely air-conditioned building, later boasted the first electronic brain (to speed market quotations to brokers) ever used by a stock exchange.

Fortnight ago, Trebilcock persuaded the board of governors to buy a site (price: $1,750,000) on which to build a new exchange, with half again as much trading space as the New York Exchange. Though brokers grumbled at the prospect of shifting from Bay Street to Toronto Street, three blocks away, they were already boasting that the new building would be the world's most efficient stock exchange.

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