Paolo Anders - The Strange Secret of William Delbert Gann: An Account of a Stock Market Scam

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I have not been able to find any evidence that William Gann ever traded for his own profit, that is to say that he ever indulged in what is now called proprietary trading. In the appendix to one of his books, The Wall Street Stock Selector, he asserted that he was not a broker, he did not sell stock or bonds and had concentrated only on the market for more than twenty years. In fact he worked as a broker more recently than 20 years earlier. In the well-known Ticker article of 1909 he asserted that:

Being in the brokerage business myself and handling large accounts, I have opportunities seldom afforded the ordinary man for studying the cause of success and failure in the speculations of others.

Proof exists that in 1920 he had some business interests other than looking after the subscribers to his private services. On March 16, 1920 the New York Times published a notice that to the effect that he had been connected with Moore, Leonard & Lynch and was now a special partner with C. J. Kelley and Co.

Moore, Leonard & Lynch were brokers affiliated to the New York Stock Exchange and C. J. Kelley were brokers at 66 and at 80 Broadway, New York; a short walk from Wall Street. There are some advertisements by Kelley in The Brooklyn Daily Eagle, for example for Thursday October 9, 1919, and they appear to have been dealers on the New York Curb Market, which was mentioned in the advertisement. The Curb Exchange was a place where some insalubrious scoundrels were operating and where stocks were traded which did not meet the listing requirements of Wall Street. The telephone number in the advertisement of Rector 8037-8-9 appears in other advertisements where the address is given as either 66 or 80 Broadway. All the advertisements of this company which I have seen mention that the stock which is advertised is supplied by the curb exchange.

On November 10, 1922 The Brooklyn Daily Eagle carried the story:

Cornelius J. Kelley of 25 Broad Street has been expelled from the Consolidated Stock Exchange. This announcement was made from the rostrum of the Exchange by President W. S. Silkworth today. Mr. Kelley was expelled for violating that section of the rules which provides that any member failing to keep a book record of all transactions shall be guilty of an act detrimental to the welfare of the Exchange.

Silkworth himself was not quite clean and later in the 1920s was convicted of the unrelated matter of mail fraud and spent a short time in a federal prison.

Prior to 1921 Broad Street was where the curb exchange was located. The Consolidated Stock Exchange was a different organisation, which competed with the New York Stock Exchange.

The New York Sun of January 4th, 1920 carried an advertisement on page 8 by C. J. Kelley for shares in Grape Ola, said in the advertisement to be a company traded on the New York Curb Exchange. C. J. Kelley were described as Specialists located at 80 Broadway, New York.

You remember the big bull market that began when the Stock Exchange resumed business in 1915. Scores of men made millions by capitalizing contracts or even promises of contracts. They became successful promoters, either with the aid of friendly bankers or by bringing out their companies on the Curb market. The public bought anything that was adequately touted.

You will soon see that William Gann had an extraordinarily convoluted style of writing, the purpose of which was to confuse his readers and limit the amount that they could learn. He was always pulling ones leg and tweaking ones nose. All readers of his books and MFCs: Beware!

According to an account, apparently by a grandson (Search for The Remarkable W. D. Gann), he was the first born of 11 children and left school without attending high school in order to help his father on his farm. Yet, when his book The Tunnel Thru The Air was published in 1927, he had, as you will see, some knowledge about the Phoenicians and the Greeks and he knew something about the technique of building wooden ships. He was also well established in his own business in Wall Street. All these things are relevant. To understand the works of this man one must get behind his eyes and see into his soul.

Although he claimed to be a scientist and mathematician, his intelligence was mainly for business and literature. This may seem strange given the mediocrity of his writing but, as we shall see, he had an astonishing ability to invent new metaphors for commonplace things. Figures of speech such as metaphors, similes and synonyms are the essence of poetry, and Mr. Gann seemed to have a liking for poetry, as was shown by many excerpts in The Tunnel Thru The Air from the works of American poets. It was not an uncommon liking in the days before radio and television. People had to entertain themselves during long winter evenings and poetry of the kind that he espoused would have provided an undemanding form of amusement. However, the poems in the book also served another purpose: they all contained coded references to precise time cycles in the stock market. These are cycles for the time at which support or resistance (see Glossary) occurs and they are not primarily for tops and bottoms in price, though these will often occur at such points. Because these time cycles are not exclusively for strictly alternating tops and bottoms they cannot be identified by conventional cycle discovery methods.My dictionary, which I will paraphrase, defines similes and metaphors in this way:

A simile is a comparison between two things, in which a comparison word is present: Lips like a red, red rose, or Shall I compare thee to a summers day? A metaphor is a simile in which the comparison word is absent, so that the nature of the comparison is not clear and it may not even be clear that a comparison is being made.