Category: Book Quotes of the Day

“I am carrying so much cotton that I can’t sleep thinking about it. It is wearing me out. What can I do?”

“Sell down to the sleeping point,” answered the friend.

If instead it reacted it meant that precedents had failed me and I was wrong; and the only thing to do when a man is wrong is to be right by ceasing to be wrong.

But you find many people, reputed to be intelligent, who are bullish because they have stocks.

But the average man doesn’t wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn’t even wish to have to think. It is too much bother to have to count the money that he picks up from the ground.

One of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eight–or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world.

Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.

Some men, like old Russell Sage, have the money-making and the money-hoarding instinct equally well developed, and of course they die disgustingly rich.

There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time. No man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily–or sufficient knowledge to make his plan an intelligent play.

I knew something was wrong somewhere, but I couldn’t spot it exactly. But if something was coming and I didn’t know where from, I couldn’t be on my guard against it. That being the case I’d better be out of the market.

By this date the post-bubble revulsion against stocks was so complete that over 60 percent of Japanese personal assets were committed to cash bearing interest of less than 0.5 percent per annum.