How a Farm Boy from Illinois Controlled 23 Million Bushels and Terrorized Two ContinentsKenny Polcari
Listen with Michael Caine™ and 800 other voices
Length42m
About this audiobook
Chicago, May 1909. The air in the Chicago Board of Trade building hangs thick with tobacco smoke and the desperate whispers of ruined men. On the trading floor, wheat prices fluctuate wildly—$1.35, $1.40, $1.42—climbing toward levels not seen since the Civil War. At the center of it all, in a worn wooden chair tilted back against a pillar, sits a man chewing gum with methodical precision. His red mustache moves rhythmically as he watches grown men beg for wheat they cannot afford to buy. James A. Patten, the son of a small-town Illinois farmer, now controls 23 million bushels of wheat—enough to feed Chicago for months, enough to break every trader who bet against him. Outside, newspaper headlines scream of bread riots and bloodshed. Inside, the Wheat King calculates his next move in a game that has already made him one of the richest men in America.
Kenny Polcari is the host of Trader Talk on Yahoo Finance, and a lifelong lover of the markets, among the last of the NYSE floor traders. View all by Kenny Polcari
