Commenting on the perils of the stock market in the nineteenth century, author Edward Chancellor notes how market operations presupposed inside information. In this period of great frenetic intemperance, operators like Daniel Drew in the early 1860’s learned the art of market manipulation. Not without its application to speculative schemes of our own days, Chancellor writes:
Male or female, rich or poor, healthy or infirm, the vast majority of speculators were necessarily outsiders, mere fodder for the great operators. It was a saying of the drover Drew that ‘anyone who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight.’” (Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, Plume, New York, p. 167)