Jones v. De Ronde

142 Misc. 831, 255 N.Y.S. 505, 1932 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 1369
CourtNew York Supreme Court
DecidedFebruary 24, 1932
StatusPublished
Cited by2 cases

This text of 142 Misc. 831 (Jones v. De Ronde) is published on Counsel Stack Legal Research, covering New York Supreme Court primary law. Counsel Stack provides free access to over 12 million legal documents including statutes, case law, regulations, and constitutions.

Bluebook
Jones v. De Ronde, 142 Misc. 831, 255 N.Y.S. 505, 1932 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 1369 (N.Y. Super. Ct. 1932).

Opinion

Black, J.

Plaintiffs in this case, who are members of the New York Stock Exchange, sued defendant for $17,951.44, balance on a customer’s account, and also claimed that there was an account stated ” as between the plaintiffs and the defendant by reason of the fact that an account had been mailed defendant, which he had accepted and retained without objection. Upon this account at the bottom were the words: “ It is agreed that all securities purchased or sold on margin or deposited in this account may be pledged by us with other securities or otherwise used in accordance with the customs of members of New York or Philadelphia Stock Exchanges, and that on default as to margin, we may buy or sell said securities without notice of time and place of sale. Please examine this statement at once, reporting promptly any discrepancy that may appear therein. If a report is not received within ten days, the account will be considered correct.” Plaintiffs also sought to sustain their contention by a printed agreement signed by the customer which will be referred to later. This agreement was headed in big type customer’s signature card.” The body of the agreement is in nonpareil type. A copy of it is attached at the end hereof.

Defendant denies that anything is due plaintiffs and claims that he repeatedly protested to plaintiffs as to the correctness and accuracy of the statements that plaintiffs had sent him, and denied [833]*833plaintiffs’ authority to make some of the trades the account showed. The customer’s signature card ” offered in evidence was signed by the defendant, who is being sued for the balance, and accepted by ” the plaintiffs by three letters written in lead pencil on the left side at the bottom. This customer’s signature card,” within its printed dimensions of eight by five inches (from which must be deducted the one and seven-eighths inches by one inch for margin and signatures) contained 455 words, and it will be observed that after the reassuring expression that stocks and securities are pledged to the broker as collateral security ” it provides “ that such stocks, securities and commodities may be loaned by the brokers ” (this means that stocks bought by the signer of the card could be loaned by the broker for short sale ” deliveries in which the plaintiffs had no interest, but which could have only the effect of bearing ” the stocks covered by plaintiffs’ purchases), “ or may be pledged, either separately or with other securities, for any amount, and commodities carried by the broker for the customer’s account, or supplied by them against sales by the customer, may be sold or purchased at brokers board, or at public and private sale, without notice of such sale or purchase deemed necessary ” (presumably in the opinion of the broker) “ for the broker’s protection; that brokers may in said purchases or sales act as principal if they so desire; that in the event of such sales or purchases being insufficient to liquidate the account, the customer agrees to pay the balance due upon demand.” It will be observed that in the first paragraph of this customer’s signature card ” the customer says: “I desire to arrange with you to act as brokers for me,” and that the expression in the second paragraph above quoted is that the brokers may in said purchases or sales act as principal if they so desire. We thus find that in the same contract the customer states his desire that the plaintiffs (the brokerage firm) act as his broker and that the brokers exact the agreement that they may act as “ principals, if they so desire.” This may mean that the broker may act as principal in dealing with outsiders, but by no flight of legal fancy could they act as principals to their customer who had in the first line of the agreement expressed his desire that the brokerage firm should act as his “ broker.”

It is difficult to conceive of a more one-sided agreement or one more unfair. To hold that it bound defendant would be to assume that the defendant understood all the whole technical and intricate workings of the Stock Exchange and its Stock Clearing Corporation, and all the customs of the exchange or market where the transactions are executed, and the court would also have to assume that the defendant (the customer) knew all the amendments to the rules or [834]*834by-laws governing the New York Stock Exchange and its clearing house. The constitution of the New York Stock Exchange comprises forty-nine pages in The Law of Stock Brokers and Stock Exchanges ” (Meyer), containing twenty-six articles and one hundred and twenty-four sections, some of which sections have twenty subdivisions. The Rules of the Stock Exchange cover thirty-four pages, twenty-two chapters, one hundred and twenty-five sections, and twenty subdivisions. Stock Exchange Rules Relating to the Delivery of Securities cover ten pages, with two-hundred and sixty-four sections. By-laws of the Stock Clearing Corporation consist of thirteen articles, thirty-nine sections and eleven subdivisions, covering twelve pages. Rules of the Stock Clearing Corporation cover forty-one pages, with forty-one rules and thirty-five subdivisions. Of course, most of these voluminous provisions do not apply to the present case.

The defendant testified that he was not very familiar with the transactions between the broker and his customer, although this was denied by plaintiffs. If the court should give the effect to the contentions which plaintiffs’ attorneys contended for, it would mean that if a customer agreed to be bound by a statement of account by a broker, and did not object within ten days, he could not afterwards be heard to say what the truth was about the account, even though, as occurred in this case, there were errors which the plaintiff itself, subsequent to the rendition of the first accounts, discovered and corrected, and if this court should hold that the broker had the unlimited and all-embracing powers covered by the contract contained in the customer’s signature card, the broker would have the right to lend stocks (bought by the customer for a rise) to himself or others for the purpose of making deliveries under so-called “ short sales.” The effect of such a ruling would be that a broker holding such a monstrous contract as that contained in the “ customer’s signature card ” could take the very stocks the customer had bought with the expectation and hope of a rise and deliver them to another customer of their own or of some other broker, so that such other customer of their own or of another broker could under the rules of the exchange use these very shares to hammer down the price not only of those shares themselves, but of the entire fist of shares dealt with on the exchange, because holders of the same shares as those bought by the customer must protect their accounts when called for margins by cash deposits realized from the sale of any other shares they may own. No one who has the least knowledge of the market would ever believe that a customer who signed a customer’s signature card ” ever had any such intention. If the intention of the plain[835]*835tiffs had been to apprise the customer of the effect of what he was signing, they could have specially set out in the “ customer’s signature card,” signed by the customer, that the broker was authorized to use the stocks which he had purchased for defendant to make deliveries under short sales. This was done in the contract in the case of Klapp v. Bache (229 App. Div. 415).

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Related

Bingham v. Commissioner
27 B.T.A. 186 (Board of Tax Appeals, 1932)

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Bluebook (online)
142 Misc. 831, 255 N.Y.S. 505, 1932 N.Y. Misc. LEXIS 1369, Counsel Stack Legal Research, https://law.counselstack.com/opinion/jones-v-de-ronde-nysupct-1932.