My main life lesson from investing: self-interest is the most powerful force on earth, and can get people to embrace and defend almost anything.
Money is made by sitting, not trading.
If the unusual never happened there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn’t be any fun in life. The game would become merely a matter of addition and subtraction. It would make of us a race of bookkeepers with plodding minds. It’s the guessing that develops a man’s brain power.
Most people, whether bull or bear, when they are right, are right for the wrong reason, in my opinion.
After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!
I cannot fear to be wrong because I never think I’m wrong until I am proven wrong. In fact, I am uncomfortable unless I am capitalizing my experience.
He really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend.
No one ever went broke by taking a profit.
There is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.
Experience has proved to me that real money made in speculating has been in commitments in a stock or commodity showing a profit right from the start.
The price pattern reminds you that every movement of importance is but a repetition of similar price movements, that just as soon as you can familiarize yourself with the actions of the past, you will be able to anticipate and act correctly and profitably upon forthcoming movements.
Never try to sell at the top. It isn’t wise. Sell after a reaction if there is no rally.
A market does not culminate in one grand blaze of glory. Neither does it end with a sudden reversal of form. A market can and does often cease to be a bull market long before prices generally begin to break.
The only thing to do when a man is wrong is to be right by ceasing to be wrong.
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.
He will risk half his fortune in the stock market with less reflection that he devotes to the selection of a medium-priced automobile.
When a man is right he wants to get all that is coming to him for being right.
I don’t know whether I make myself plain, but I never lose my temper over the stock market. I never argue with the tape. Getting sore at the market doesn’t get you anywhere.
I did precisely the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out. Of all the speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game. Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit.
People who look for easy money invariably pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this earth.