VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
wasn't really my deal, but Thomas'. Of all speculative blunders there are few greater
than trying to average a losing game. My cotton deal proved it to the hilt a little later.
Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit. That was so
obviously the wise thing to do and was so well known to me that even now I marvel at
myself for doing the reverse.
And so I sold my wheat, deliberately cut short my profit in it. After I got out of it the
price went up twenty cents a bushel without stopping. If I had kept it I might have taken
a profit of about eight million dollars. And having decided to keep on with the losing
proposition I bought more cotton!
I remember very clearly how every day I would buy cotton, more cotton. And why do
you think I bought it? To keep the price from going down! If that isn't a supersucker
play, what is? I simply kept on putting up more and more money more money to lose
eventually. My brokers and my intimate friends could not understand it; and they don't
to this day. Of course if the deal had turned out differently I would have been a wonder.
More than once I was warned against placing too much reliance on Percy Thomas'
brilliant analyses. To this I paid no heed, but kept on buying cotton to keep it from going
down. I was even buying it in Liverpool. I accumulated four hundred and forty thousand
bales before I realised what I was doing. And then it was too late. So I sold out my line.
I lost nearly all that I had made out of all my other deals in stocks and commodities. I
was not completely cleaned out, but I had left fewer hundreds of thousands than I had
millions before I met my brilliant friend Percy Thomas. For me of all men to violate all
the laws that experience had taught me to observe in order to prosper was more than
asinine.
To learn that a man can make foolish plays for no reason whatever was a valuable
lesson. It cost me millions to learn that another dangerous enemy to a trader is his
susceptibility to the urgings of a magnetic personality when plausibly expressed by a
brilliant mind. It has always seemed to me, however, that I might have learned my
lesson quite as well if the cost had been only one million. But Fate does not always let
you fix the tuition fee. She delivers the educational wallop and presents her own bill,
knowing you have to pay it, no matter what the amount may be. Having learned what
folly I was capable of I closed that particular incident. Percy Thomas went out of my
life.
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