One of the brightest operators who ever played the unbeatable game once told me that all he asked in a bull market — or a bear market, for that matter — was to be the last fool but one.
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It is only fair to admit that the commonest and most expensive blunder that all exceptionally brilliant business men make is being right too soon.
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It is not the certainty of disaster ahead but the uncertainty of better days to come that keeps the investor from buying.
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The demand for reform is naturally greatest after a market crash, which is usually precipitated by multitudes of little gamblers who are themselves their own victims.
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After many years of studying Wall Street’s victors and victims, I must conclude that the American public still insists on losing its savings every time the old hook is baited with the immortal easy-money worm. After every smash the blame is laid on the hook and not on the hunger.
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Firmly believing that stock speculation is an unbeatable game, I have come to the conclusion that while no bear operator ever made a large fortune in the stock market and kept it, unless he trusteed it, the greatest losses are sustained by the bulls, not because they are bulls, but because there are more of them — more optimists than pessimists.
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On October 24, 1929, millions of Americans recalled poignantly the hundreds of blithe prophecies that our feelings never again would be harrowed by absurd exhibitions of mob hysteria or mass emotionalism in the stock market. We were living in a new era.
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The public today is just as eager to buy a mystery as it was fifteen years ago or fifty years ago. The psychology of greed and cupidity has not changed appreciably.
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It is one of the maxims of speculation that stocks never go up, but must be put up.
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One of the speculators’ hells consists of thinking of the money you didn’t make. If you had only done what you ought to have done, but didn’t!
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The stock ticker knows more than everybody. It deals with results. It satisfies your craving for action. It makes life worth living. And when it says that you are an ass, it convinces even you of it.
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A man who has bought a stock against the advice of a conservative broker, and has doubled his money in a fortnight, finds his suspicions turned into convictions by the impartial judge, the stock ticker.
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All booms are alike. The stage setting varies, but fundamentally they are as drops of water. Customs, like costumes, change from force of environment and economic conditions, but human nature remains the same.
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For years I have contended that the average speculator does not lose his money in Wall Street. He loses it wherever he happens to be the instant he decides to let the ticker put unearned dollars in his pocket. The game does not beat the player; he beats himself.
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I think I am safe in asserting that the margin trader, speculator, gambler, or whatever you choose to designate the average man who goes to Wall Street after easy money, does not lose money when he sells. He loses it when he buys!
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The human animal never behaves as wisely as he means to, particularly when his counselor is Hope or Fear.
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It is a curious fact that although all booms are alike, all are different.
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Periods of depression invariably follow periods of overoptimism, when fear replaces hope as the controlling emotion.
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You can’t imagine how many shrewd, experienced business men forget in Wall Street what it took them years to learn.
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Intelligent speculators and investors who do not play the market feverishly do not need to spend the day beside a ticker or before a quotation board.
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Anything that helps make addicts out of occasional traders should be avoided as if it were the bubonic plague.
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Nobody knows what the stock market is going to do or even what it ought to do. Hence, the most valuable asset in all business, which is knowledge, is necessarily absent.
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In the history of every great catastrophe, you will find that some masterly bit of stupidity sets fire to the oil-soaked rags.
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Wall Street in boom days is an aggregation of madmen. The Stock Exchange becomes Bedlam well dressed.
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In the beginning of a stock market boom it is ever the “dear public,” the fleecy lambs, the most guileless victims, who make the most money. They really do not know when to stop winning, and so in the end they lose profit and principal.
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Greed is a bandage which a higher power sometimes binds across the eyes of reason.
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Fortunes are made and lost by thousands of men in the stock market; they are made and kept by a few dozen.
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Many things are possible in Wall Street. But neither there nor anywhere else has a man ever prospered by trying to hog it.
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In Wall Street, what has happened before will happen again. It must, as you will admit if you stop to think about it.
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The trading favorites of 1928 were high-priced, untried, and unseasoned stocks that made one wonder whether the public did not think that the higher the price the better the stock.
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It is one of the common pieces of Wall Street experience that when the public goes stock mad and the market leaders are filled with the arrogance of prolonged success, such little things as high money rates or decreases in earnings or unraised dividends have no instant effect on the market — that is, on the state of mind of the speculating public. In the end, of course, all violations of the fundamental laws of economic and financial common sense are paid for; but every bull thinks he will unload before the break.
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“Easy money” means only one thing when it means money that has come easy: It means money goes even more easily than it came.
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Happy is the man who has no past! The same seems to be true of corporations in a bull market.
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Buying stocks of prosperous concerns may be good business — but only at a certain price. But if you will make sure you know what you are getting for your money, you will be doing what nobody does in a bull market.
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