As my broker and I both knew which stocks we were quoting, we only used the first letter of the name of each stock I owned. But because these were not the normal stock-market abbreviations which are known all over the world, these constant mysterious letter-figure cables upset and bothered post-office employees almost everywhere. Before they handed my first cables to me, I had to give them a detailed explanation of what they contained. They obviously thought I must be a secret agent. I was constantly confronted with this suspicion, especially in the Far East.
