A public-opinion poll is no substitute for thought. Beware of geeks bearing formulas. Chains of habit are too light to be felt until they are too heavy to be broken. Derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction. I always knew I was going to be rich. I don't think I ever doubted...

I WENT to work when I was just out of grammar school. I got a job as quotation-board boy in a stock-brokerage office. I was quick at figures. At school I did three years of arithmetic in one. I was particularly good at mental arithmetic. As quotation-board boy I posted the numbers on the big...

BETWEEN the discovery that the Cosmopolitan Stock Brokerage Company was ready to beat me by foul means if the killing handicap of a three-point margin and a point-and-a-half premium didn't do it, and hints that they didn't want my business anyhow, I soon made up my mind to go to New...

It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all his mistakes. They say there are two sides to everything. But there is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side. It took me longer to get that general principle fixed firmly in my...

WELL, I went home. But the moment I was back I knew that I had but one mission in life and that was to get a stake and go back to Wall Street. That was the only place in the country where I could trade heavily. Some day, when my game was all right, I'd need such a place. When a man is right...

THE average ticker hound or as they used to call him, tape-worm goes wrong, I suspect, as much from over specialization as from anything else. It means a highly expensive inelasticity. After all, the game of speculation isn't all mathematics or set rules, however rigid the main laws may be....

IN the spring of 1906 I was in Atlantic City for a short vacation. I was out of stocks and was thinking only of having a change of air and a nice rest. By the way, I had gone back to my first brokers, Harding Brothers, and my account had got to be pretty active. I could swing three or four...

I NEVER hesitate to tell a man that I am bullish or bearish. But I do not tell people to buy or sell any particular stock. In a bear market all stocks go down and in a bull market they go up. I don't mean of course that in a bear market caused by a war, ammunition shares do not go up. I...

THE Union Pacific incident in Saratoga in the summer of 1906 made me more independent than ever of tips and talk that is, of the opinions and surmises and suspicions of other people, however friendly or however able they might be personally. Events, not vanity, proved for me that I could read the...

CRUISED off the coast of Florida. The fishing was good. I was out of stocks. My mind was easy. I was having a fine time. One day off Palm Beach some friends came alongside in a motor boat. One of them brought a newspaper with him. I hadn't looked at one in some days and had not felt any...