VOObyM

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
is how I lived. Well, say that is how I sustained life.
Of course, I didn't always lose, but I never made enough to allow me materially to
reduce what I owed. Finally, as things got worse, I felt the beginnings of discouragement
for the first time in my life.
Everything seemed to have gone wrong with me. I did not go about bewailing the
descent from millions and yachts to debts and the simple life. I didn't enjoy the situation,
but I did not fill up with self-pity. I did not propose to wait patiently for time and
Providence to bring about the cessation of my discomforts. I therefore studied my
problem. It was plain that the only way out of my troubles was by making money. To
make money I needed merely to trade successfully. I had so traded before and I must do
so once more. More than once in the past I had run up a shoe string into hundreds of
thousands. Sooner or later the market would offer me an opportunity.
I convinced myself that whatever was wrong was wrong with me and not with the
market. Now what could be the trouble with me? I asked myself that question in the
same spirit in which I always study the various phases of my trading problems. I thought
about it calmly and came to the conclusion that my main trouble came from worrying
over the money I owed. I was never free from the mental discomfort of it. I must explain
to you that it was not the mere consciousness of my indebtedness. Any business man
contracts debts in the course of his regular business. Most of my debts were really
nothing but business debts, due to what were unfavourable business conditions for me,
and no worse than a merchant suffers from, for instance, when there is an unusually
prolonged spell of unseasonable weather.
Of course as time went on and I could not pay I began to feel less philosophical about
my debts. I'll explain: I owed over a million dollars all of it stock-market losses,
remember. Most of my creditors were very nice and didn't bother me; but there were two
who did bedevil me. They used to follow me around. Every time I made a winning each
of them was Johnny-on-the-spot, wanting to know all about it and insisting on getting
theirs right off. One of them, to whom I owed eight hundred dollars, threatened to sue
me, seize my furniture, and so forth. I can't conceive why he thought I was concealing
assets, unless it was that I didn't quite look like a stage hobo about to die of destitution.
As I studied the problem I saw that it wasn't a case that called for reading the tape but
for reading my own self. I quite cold-bloodedly reached the conclusion that I would
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