Business & Finance: Blair-Rockefeller

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It was in October that the Cuttens began operations in Sinclair Consolidated. They bid for it by the ten thousand, by the twenty thousand, by the forty thousand-share blocks. Once indeed Nephew Cutten bid for 100,000 shares of Sinclair at 42—a transaction involving $4,200,000. Finally, on Oct. 26, it was announced that Arthur W. Cutten was to become a director of Sinclair Consolidated—one of the very few directorates on which Mr. Cutten has ever consented to serve. According to the general estimate, he has purchased 1,300,000 shares of Sinclair. He controls probably 20% of the entire Sinclair issue.

With Blair & Co. in Prairie, with Cutten in Sinclair, drawers of inferences soon began to predict a Prairie-Sinclair merger. Point One: Elisha Walker is a Sinclair director—a potent and obvious point. Point Two: Prairie Oil & Gas, with assets of $186,323,925, is the largest U. S. producer of crude oil. Harry F. Sinclair needs constantly more oil for the Sinclair Refining Co. Obviously happy would be an arrangement whereby Sinclair refineries could call upon Prairie Oil, whereby Prairie Oil would have an affiliated customer in Sinclair Refining. Why should not Sinclair Directors Walker and Cutten confer together, arrange a merger of Sinclair, Prairie, and, the government permitting, various smaller companies? So the rumors ran; so the oil stock boomed. Yet no authoritative announcement, no merger was forecast for the near future.

In 1886 a hardware store on Lake Street, Chicago, had for a messenger boy 15-year-old Arthur Cutten. Soon Arthur Cutten, still a messenger boy, was working for a commission house. From messenger boy he became a clerk for A. S. White, onetime president of the Chicago Board of Trade. Later he was one of A. S. White's pit traders. Then he entered the grain market for himself, and during the World War is said to have made more money than any other individual operator. He once accumulated four million bushels of corn, bought at 80¢ a bushel or less; held them until they sold at from $1.11 to $1.14½; realized a profit of a million dollars. It was in railroad stocks, however, that he made his first market profits. Back in 1904 he bought some 1,500 shares of Soo Line stock at from 54 to 60, sold at 160, made what he would now consider the trifling profit of $150,000. Since beginning his eastern operations, U. S. Steel, International Harvester,.Radio Corp., Sears Roebuck and Montgomery Ward have been among his favorite stocks. He is believed to have bought 100,000 shares of Montgomery Ward when it was selling at 75. Last week the Montgomery Ward quotation reached 438½, which would give Mr. Cutten a paper profit of about $36,000,000.

Such leisure as he possesses he spends in California, Florida or on his 800-acre farm near Chicago. On this farm he raises, appropriately, bulls.

Whether Mr. Cutten bought Sinclair stock with a Sinclair-Prairie consolidation in mind, or whether his purchase represents only a characteristic bullish point of view on oils, is a question upon which one man's opinion is as good as any other man's—except Mr. Cutten's. The situation is somewhat complicated by the fact that Mr. Cutten has arrived at the position in which any stock that he buys is automatically skyrocketed by his buying it.