Soon a much hotter business than show business attracted my attention, and the attention of the country. It was a little thing called the stock market. I first became acquainted with it around 1926. It was a pleasant surprise to discover that I was a pretty talented trader. Or at least so it seemed, for everything I bought went up. I had no financial adviser. Who needed one? You could close your eyes, stick your finger any place on the big board and the stock you had just bought would start rising. I never took profits. It seemed absurd to sell a stock at thirty when you knew it would double or triple within a year.
The most astonishing thing about the '29 market was that no one ever sold a stock. The public just kept buying. One day I rather timidly asked my broker about this speculative phenomenon. "I don't know much about Wall Street," I began apologetically, "but what makes these stocks continue to go up? Shouldn't there be some relation between a company's earnings, its dividends and the stock's selling price?" He looked over my head at a new victim who had just entered the office, and said, "Mr. Marx, you've got a lot to learn about the stock market. What you don't know about securities would fill a book."
One special day, the market began wavering. Some of the people I knew lost millions. I was luckier. All I lost was two hundred and forty thousand dollars. (Or one hundred and twenty weeks of work at two thousand per.) I would have lost more but that was all the money I had. The day of the final, convulsive crash, my friend, sometime financial adviser and talented trader, Max Gordon, phoned me from New York. In five words, he issued a statement that I think will, in time, compare favorably with any of the more memorable quotations in American history. I'm referring to such imperishable lines as "Don't give up the ship," "Don't fire until you see the whites of their eyes," "Give me liberty or give me death!" and "I have but one life to give to my country." These words sink into comparative insignificance alongside Max's notable quote. Never the frilly type of conversationalist, this time he even ignored the traditional "Hello." All he said was, "Marx, the jig is up!" Before I could answer, the phone was dead.
Groucho MARX, Groucho and me.
