campaign , one that sought to correct longstanding abuses of investors by investment banks and other financial institutions .
A particularly Lawsonian presence at that time was “ Anthony @ Pacific ,” whose internet chat room and Silicon Investor message board thread focused upon an “ Autopsy of Wall Street .” A @ P , as he became known , was one Amr Ibrahim Elgindy , and his voyage from selling cars to working as a retail stockbroker to becoming an advocate for the so-called little guy was an intrinsic part of his spiel . Primarily a short seller , Elgindy sold memberships to his private chat room and broadcast his short picks there and on the Silicon Investor site , often with an immediate impact upon a target stock ’ s prices .
Their views on the overall state of financial economics are similar . Lawson , in “ High Cost Living ” ( 1913 ):
There is a trick machinery at work which during the past 40 years has illegally injected into the existing volume of stocks and bonds over 30 billions of fictitious value … [ And ] through this trick machinery a few men who control it and who control the industries upon which the stocks and bonds are based take from the people five per cent on this 30 billions ... one billion and a half dollars yearly … [ And ] through this trick machinery , also , they take another billion and a half dollars , which they collect yearly by means of the fraudulently manipulated ups and downs in stock and bond prices ... the trick machinery is the Stock Exchange- ” Money Trust ”… [ a ] wholesale looting , right now , of American and European investors of hundreds of millions of dollars .
And Elgindy , described 90 years later in Wired magazine , expressed a similar conceptualization of the System :
Anthony ’ s view of the market is uniformly black . He believes that corporate accounting is bogus , that press releases are untrue and that Wall Street is “ the most manipulated scam and corrupt marketplace on Earth right now …” [ He ] laughs with scornful delight at the notion of a fair and massively popular stock market . He views the competition among brokerage firms , market makers and the new electronic trading systems merely as a staged showbiz feud … The
The AMC Empire 25 on 42nd Street in New York City . AMC was one of several oddball stocks that began rising disproportionately in early 2021 , along with GameStop , Nokia , Blackberry , Bed Bath & Beyond and others .
online brokerages lure new herds of sheep into the game and collect the admission fees while the market makers do the shearing .
Ultimately styled the “ Mad Max of Wall Street ” and having had an uncanny record of predicting stocks that would soon be targets of Securities and Exchange Commission ( SEC ) or FBI investigations , the short-selling avenger ’ s operations came to an inauspicious end on January 24 , 2005 .
Stock trader Anthony Elgindy was convicted on Monday of using secret government information to profit in the market , while [ an ] FBI agent ... was convicted of tipping him off about companies facing criminal investigations ... Prosecutors said Elgindy would use information from [ the agent ] to sell companies ’ stock short and advise subscribers to his Web site to do the same . Access to information about government investigations that could cause a stock price to fall would be an unfair trading advantage . They said Elgindy portrayed himself as a crusader against companies that were defrauding investors and said he made millions of dollars from subscribers , who paid up to $ 600 a month to access his Web site , anthonypacific . com .
He was sentenced to 11 years in prison but released in 2013 .
Lawson ’ s Decline
At the conclusion of World War I , Lawson was a mostly forgotten figure , except to those bitterly recalling his stock market exploits of a decade and a half earlier . A 1919 newspaper reports :
A mortgage given by Thomas W . Lawson on his Dreamwold Estate to the Quincy Trust Co . of Boston indicates that his latest financial operations are not going well . This is quite a change . There was a time when Lawson could surround himself with a considerable following , but that was when the public did not know him as well as it does now . He has followed them often enough but he discovers there was considerable truth in Lincoln ’ s observation that you cannot fool all the people all the time . By the cry of “ wolf ” against the financial interest he has turned their fears to his advantage . Lately his outgivings in his advertising have not rallied a beggar ’ s guard to any of his flotations and it is evident from his recorded mortgage that his speculations of late also have not turned out profitably . Very few will waste any sympathy on Lawson .
The last we hear of Lawson as a subject of current events is his death , reported on February 8 , 1925 . In The New York Times obituary , the last few years of his life following the arrest for stock manipulation present an altogether depressing image .
Paul Sableman
22 FINANCIAL HISTORY | Summer 2021 | www . MoAF . org