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

by Edwin Lefèvre

Fiction writers, clergymen and women are fond of alluding to the floor of the Stock Exchange as a boodlers’ battlefield and to Wall Street’s daily business as a fight. It is quite dramatic but utterly misleading. I do not think that my business is strife and contest. I never fight either individuals or speculative cliques. I merely differ in opinion—that is, in my reading of basic conditions. What playwrights call battles of business are not fights between human beings. They are merely tests of business vision. I try to stick to facts and facts only, and govern my actions accordingly. That is Bernard M. Baruch’s recipe for success in wealth-winning. Sometimes I do not see the facts—all the facts—clearly enough or early enough; or else I do not reason logically. Whenever any of these things happen I lose. I am wrong. And it always costs me money to be wrong.