IGPK- No organized crime syndicates or counterfeiters in history have ever come up with a racket as profitable as manipulating stock prices. Al Capone must have been back in Chicago in the 1920s wondering why he was working so hard making a dishonest living bootlegging alcohol when the easy money could be made legally on Wall Street. Capone had to manage a vast distribution network, all the while keeping competition and law at bay with a small army of Tommy Gun-toting thugs. Pool operators, conversely, just planted a few well-placed rumors and then sat back running the ticker through their fingers while puffing cigars and chuckling amongst themselves. Jesse Livermore was the most notorious “player,” along with General Motors founder William Durant, who’d realized by then that moving stocks was easier than challenging Ford making cars. People knew what was going on and that the players paid off newspapers to print news about companies, but small investors still hoped to ride the prices up themselves and not be the ones left holding the “chop stock” in the sell-off. The impact of pool operators on small investors wasn’t so much negative as random. It was like a game of musical chairs; as long as you had a chair each time the music stopped (had already sold your shares), it didn’t matter that it was just a game.
