1 The narrator takes his first job as a quotation-board boy at a stock brokerage off the New York Stock Exchange. He is quick with figures and watches the tape behaviour of stocks like Hollow Tube and Erie, keeping a small book of hits and misses to test his memory against the next day's quotations.
2 He learns, in the bucket shops that dotted the city in those years, that anticipating price movements is a craft built on observation of tape behaviour, not on tips from customers crowded around the ticker.