Do not let anyone else run your business.
The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy.
It must be fundamentally wrong to reduce production of food and fiber while one-third of our population is still ill fed and ill clothed.
It requires strength of character in order to think and to act in opposite fashion from the crowd and also patience to wait for opportunities that may be spaced years apart.
Both a priori reasoning and experience teach us that as as these funds grow larger the geometrical rate of growth by compound interest ultimately defeats itself.
There is something paradoxical in the fact that by establishing an export market we subject our entire domestic production to the vagaries of that market.
It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.
The story of Joseph in Egypt and of the seven fat and the seven lean years has passed into the homely wisdom of the ages; but our economic thinking seems to have lost contact with so simple and basic approach to prudent management of a nations welfare.
The genuine investor in common stocks does not need a great equipment of brain and knowledge, but he does need some unusual qualities of character.
Many progressive economists insist that gold is now in essentially the same position as silver and that the arguments the simon-pure gold advocates use against the white metal can be directed with equal effect against their own fetish.
The purchase of a bargain issue presupposes that the market’s current appraisal is wrong, or at least that the buyer’s idea of value is more likely to be right than the market’s. In this process the investor sets his judgement against that of the market. To some this may seem arrogant or foolhardy.
Why should the cotton growers suffer if there is shortage of wheat?
The Reservoir system will function not only as an equalizer of business conditions, but also as a national store to meet further emergencies, such as war and drought, and-most important of all-as the concrete means of developing a steadily higher living standard for all.
Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.
It is a fact worth pondering that four centuries ago the evil of “an abundance or surplus” arose from its being kept off the market, while today the evil of surplus lies in its being thrown upon the market.
Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.
The volume of credit depends upon three factors: the desire to borrow, the ability to lend and the desire to lend.
Good managements produce a good average market price, and bad managements produce bad market prices.
The value of the security analyst to the investor depends largely on the investor’s own attitude. If the investor asks the analyst the right questions, he is likely to get the right or at least valuable answers.
Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, its very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult.