Part 54

Many of the so-called statements attributed to “insiders” or officials have no basis in fact. Sometimes the insiders are not even asked to make a statement, anonymous or signed. These stories are invented by somebody or other who has a large interest in the market. At a certain stage of an advance in the market-price of a security the big insiders are not averse to getting the help of the professional element to trade in that stock. But while the insider might tell the big plunger the right time to buy, you can bet he will never tell when is the time to sell. That puts the big professional in the same position as the public, only he has to have a market big enough for him to get out on. Then is when you get the most misleading “information.” Of course, there are certain insiders who cannot be trusted at any stage of the game. As a rule the men who are the head of big corporations may act in the market upon their inside knowledge, but they don’t actually tell lies. They merely say nothing, for they have discovered that there are times when silence is golden.

I have said many times and cannot say it too often that the experience of years as a stock operator has convinced me that no man can consistently and continuously beat the stock market though he may make money in individual stocks on certain occasions. No matter how experienced a trader is the possibility of his making losing plays is always present because speculation cannot be made 100 per cent safe. Wall Street professionals know that acting on “inside” tips will break a man more quickly than famine, pestilence, crop failures, political readjustments or what might be called normal accidents. There is no asphalt boulevard to success in Wall Street or anywhere else. Why additionally block traffic?

Transcriber’s Notes

Punctuation and spelling were made consistent when a predominant preference was found in the original book; otherwise they were not changed. Inconsistent hyphenation was not changed.

Simple typographical errors were corrected; unbalanced quotation marks were remedied when the change was obvious, and otherwise left unbalanced.

The illustration on the title page is the publisher’s logo.

Page 224: “they were afraid of getting stock if they tried to” was printed that way; “stock” may be a typographic error for “stuck”.