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Reminiscences of a Stock Operator
Chapter VIII
The Union Pacific incident in Saratoga in the summer of 1906 made me more
independent than ever of tips and talk that is, of the opinions and surmises and
suspicions of other people, however friendly or however able they might be personally.
Events, not vanity, proved for me that I could read the tape more accurately than most of
the people about me. I also was better equipped than the average customer of Harding
Brothers in that I was utterly free from speculative prejudices. The bear side doesn't
appeal to me any more than the bull side, or vice versa. My one steadfast prejudice is
against being wrong.
Even as a lad I always got my own meanings out of such facts as I observed. It is the
only way in which the meaning reaches me. I cannot get out of facts what somebody
tells me to get. They are my facts, don't you see? If I believe some thing you can be sure
it is because I simply must. When I am long of stocks it is because my reading of
conditions has made me bullish. But you find many people, reputed to be intelligent,
who are bullish because they have stocks. I do not allow my possessions or my
prepossessions either to do any thinking for me. That is why I repeat that I never argue
with the tape. To be angry at the market because it unexpectedly or even illogically goes
against you is like getting mad at your lungs because you have pneumonia.
I had been gradually approaching the full realization of how much more than tape
reading there was to stock speculation. Old man Partridge's insistence on the vital
importance of being continuously bullish in a bull market doubtless made tny mind
dwell on the need above all other things of determining the kind of market a man is
trading in. I began to realize that the big money must necessarily be in the big swing.
Whatever might seem to give a big swing its initial impulse, the fact is that its
continuance is not the result of manipulation by pools or artifice by financiers, but
depends upon basic conditions. And no matter who opposes it, the swing must inevitably
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