Eventually, spreads always came in; that was the lesson he had learned from the Eckstein affair, and it was a lesson he would count on, years later, at Long-Term Capital. But there was a different lesson, equally valuable, that Meriwether might have drawn from the Eckstein business, had his success not come so fast: while a losing trade may well turn around eventually (assuming, of course, that it was properly conceived to begin with), the turn could arrive too late to do the trader any good—meaning, of course, that he might go broke in the interim.
