Memorable Quotes from Reminiscences Of A Stock Operator
There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.
------------------------------------------------------------
Of course there is always a reason for fluctuations, but what the tape does not concern itself with the why and wherefore. It doesn't go into explanations. The reason for what a certain stock does today may not be known for two or three days, or weeks, or months. But what the dickens does that matter? Your business with the tape is now - not tomorrow. The reason can wait. But you must act instantly or be left.
-----------------------------------------------------------
There is a time for all things, but I didn't know it. And that is precisely what beats so many men on Wall Street who are very far from being in the main sucker class. There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time. No man can always have adequate reasons for buying and selling stocks daily - or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play.
------------------------------------------------------------
The desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses on Wall Street even among the professionals, who feel that they must take home some money every day, as though they were working for regualr wages.
------------------------------------------------------------
A stock operator has to fight a lot expensive enemies within himself.
------------------------------------------------------------
I never argue with the tape. Getting sore at the market doesn't get you anywhere.
------------------------------------------------------------
Much more to the game of speculation than to play for fluctuations for a few points.
------------------------------------------------------------
There is one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or bear side, but the right side.
------------------------------------------------------------
A man must believe in himself and his judgement if he expects to make a living at this game.
------------------------------------------------------------
Speculation is a hard and trying business, and a speculator must be on the job all the time or he'll soon have no job to be on.
-----------------------------------------------------------
It seems so obvious now that tape reading is not enough, irrespective of broker execution, that I wonder why I didn't then see both my trouble and the remedy for it.
------------------------------------------------------------
I can't tell you how it came to take me so many years to learn that instead of placing piking bets on what the next few quotations were going to be, my game was to anticipate what was going to happen in a big way.
------------------------------------------------------------
Since suckers always lose money when they gamble on stocks - they never really speculate.
-----------------------------------------------------------
There is nothing like losing all you have in the world for teaching you what not to do. And when you know what not to do in order to lose money, you begin to learn what to do in order to win. Did you get that? You begin to learn!
------------------------------------------------------------
The game of speculation isn't all mathematics or set rules, however rigid the main laws may be.
------------------------------------------------------------
If a stock doesn't act right don't touch it; because being unable to tell precisely what is wrong; you cannot tell which way it is going.
------------------------------------------------------------
I should say that a chart helps those who can read it or rather who can assimilate what they read. The average chart reader, however, is apt to become obsessed with the notion that the dips and peaks and primary and secondary movements are all there is to stock speculation. If he pushes his confidence to its logical limit he is bound to go broke.
------------------------------------------------------------
I can see now that my main trouble was my failure to grasp the fundamental difference between stock gambling and stock speculation.
------------------------------------------------------------
The game of beating the market exclusively interested me from ten until three every day, and after three, the game of living my life.
------------------------------------------------------------
I had to study what was going to happen; to anticipate stock movements.
------------------------------------------------------------
It was the change in my own attitude that was of supreme importance to me. It taught me little by little, the essential difference between betting on fluctuations and anticipating inevitable advances and declines, between gambling and speculating.
------------------------------------------------------------
I made up my mind to be wise and play carefully, conservatively. Everybody knew that the way to do that was to take profits and buy back your stocks on reactions. And that is precisely what I did, or rather what I tried to do.....They say you never grow broke taking profits. No, you don't. But neither do you grow rich taking a four point profit in a bull market.
------------------------------------------------------------
"Well this is a bull market,you know!"
He really meant to tell them that the big money was not in individual fluctuations but in the main movements - that is not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.
------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------ |
