I am the market
I HAVE a fellow feeling for the brave dons from London University who are setting out to compile an oral history of the jobbing system. Its records are in memor- ies, not on paper — and, when transferred to the printed page, will look odd. The jobber's vocabulary, as Sherlock Holmes said of Bradshaw's, is nervous and tense but limited. Among its more printable words are 'yours' and 'stuffed'. David Kynaston, whose project this is (he is the
historian of the Financial Times and of Cazenove) has wisely called in the keeper of sound records at the Imperial War Museum. I hope this range will be wide enough to take in Arthur Trinder of the Union Discount, reaching his Cornhill office at mid-morning in time to breakfast off a smoked salmon sandwich and gin and tonic, before strolling across to stub out his cigar on the portico of the Bank of Eng- land. Lord Justice Parker's tribunal of inquiry (into stories of a Bank rate leak) asked Trinder about the market in British Government bonds. He said: 'I am the market.' All the great jobbers thought like that. Now they are gone, and quite a lot of the markets seem to have gone, too. Two-thirds of the companies with Stock Exchange quotations find their shares clas- sed as gamma or delta stocks. They also find that in the last two years, the market- makers have almost halved the size of the bargains for which they are willing to quote — and the spread between their buying and selling prices has widened from 5 per cent to 81/2 per cent. Bring back the jobber's turn!
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