The system, the advantages of which are often called in question, is peculiar to the London Stock Exchange. It does not exist in New York, or in Paris, or in the other principal business centres of the world. It is obvious, however, that it acts as something of a check in the interest of the public unversed in the methods of the market. Were an outside buyer or seller to deal direct with a market professional, he would be entirely at his mercy, whereas by employing another market professional to deal for him he brings into play the principle of diamond cut diamond. It is quite easy to bid on one's own behalf in an auction room, but it is usually found more profitable to pay a commission to someone who knows the ropes; and the intricacies of auction buying are not to be compared with those of transactions in stocks and shares. That, of course, is not the only advantage of employing a broker as agent to deal with a jobber who is a merchant. The wares of the Stock Exchange are numerous and varied; more than four thousand separate securities are quoted in the Official Price List of the market, and the number of stocks and shares dealt in which are not quoted in this list is legion. One might wander about the Stock Exchange all day, and frequent hundreds of brokers' offices which surround it, without being able to find a seller of the certain stock one wants to buy, or a buyer of the certain stock one wants to sell. In the existence of the jobbers there is organisation. They stand in their own markets waiting either to buy or sell the few special securities in which they are always prepared to deal. In cases where there is intimate connection between a company and a jobber whom it employs to retail its securities, that jobber is called "the shop" in such securities. Jobbers are often called dealers; the broker, of course, deals in a sense, and so does the outside investor or speculator, but the term dealer is frequently used, to the confusion of the uninitiated, in the limited sense of being synonymous with the term jobber.
By making a speciality of a limited number of securities, the jobber is able to keep his finger on the pulse of the market, and to gauge accurately at any moment its supply and demand. He must do this in his own interest, for he must ever be ready to buy and sell at the demand of the broker whom the public sends to him. This is compulsory under the law of competition, for, of course although the jobber confines his attention to comparatively few stocks, he has no monopoly; there are other jobbers in the same market anxious to secure the orders which the brokers bring in. The jobber obtains his supply generally by purchase in the market, always endeavouring to charge a slightly higher price for it than that at which he has bought it or thinks he can buy it.