Quote for the Week
After more than thirty years of studying stock speculation and speculators, I have arrived at the conclusion that, in the order of their importance, the principal contributory causes to the public’s losses during all booms are the following:
- The public itself. I mean the motives that make the public go to Wall Street. This is true of rich and poor, of heads of business houses and of salaried clerks, since all of them overstay the market. By “all” I really mean only 99.7 percent. Those who didn’t lose in ’29 lost in ’30 or ’31.
- Remediable evils. You might say, old trade customs, to Wall Street’s antiquated point of view. Many things are done or left undone by commission houses which tend to make more certain the certainty of losses by their customers. Nevertheless, I am convinced that commission brokers did less to damage the public that speculated than those banks and banking houses which worked by themselves or in association with promoters and pools and syndicates. They perceived that the public’s capacity for absorbing stocks was practically unlimited and they overcapitalized that appetite the way they overcapitalized everything else. Some day the history of the worse than blindness of our banks, bankers, and corporation heads in 1928 and 1929 will be written — and not believed.
- The average stockbroker’s perfectly human desire to do as much business as he can, when he remembers the long spells of fasting that go with the occasional gorging. — Edwin Lefevre (source)
From the Archives
Last Call
- The Bull Market in Grifters – C. Roche
- The Gilded Age Circus is Back in Town – Financial History
- 1910: The Year the Modern World Lost Its Mind – D. Thompson
- Diary of a Bear Market – Becoming Berkshire
- Five Things I Learned From Chris Davis About Intelligent Investing – Kingswell
- The Value of Patience – The Leap
- Predicting Our Own Demise – Reducible Errors
- How Social Media Shortens Your Life – The Prism
- Scientific Fraud has Become an Industry – Science
- Dicing an Onion the Mathematically Optimal Way – The Pudding