Reminiscences of a Stock Operator (A Marketplace Book Book 173)

by Edwin Lefèvre

A stock which it is desired to distribute should be manipulated to the highest possible point and then sold. I repeat this both because it is fundamental and because the public apparently believes that the selling is all done at the top. Sometimes a stock gets waterlogged, as it were; it doesn’t go up. That is the time to sell. The price naturally will go down on your selling rather further than you wish, but you can generally nurse it back. As long as a stock that I am manipulating goes up on my buying I know I am all hunky, and if need be I buy it with confidence and use my own money without fear—precisely as I would any other stock that acts the same way. It is the line of least resistance. You remember my trading theories about that line, don’t you? Well, when the price line of least resistance is established I follow it, not because I am manipulating that particular stock at that particular moment but because I am a stock operator at all times. When my buying does not put the stock up I stop buying and then proceed to sell it down; and that also is exactly what I would do with that same stock if I did not happen to be manipulating it. The principal marketing of the stock, as you know, is done on the way down. It is perfectly astonishing how much stock a man can get rid of on a decline. I repeat that at no time during the manipulation do I forget to be a stock trader. My problems as a manipulator, after all, are the same that confront me as an operator. All manipulatio...