One of the most helpful things that any body can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth - or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world.

It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all of his mistakes. They say there are two sides to everything. But there is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side. It took me longer to get that general principle fixed firmly in my mind than it did most of the more technical phases of the game of stock speculation.

The principles of successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people will continue in the future to make the mistakes that they have made in the past.

The speculators deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope. All the statute books in the world and all the rules of all the Exchanges on earth cannot eliminate these from the human animal.

The public always wants to be told.

A stock operator has to fight a lot of expensive enemies within himself.

Fear and hope remain the same; therefore the study of the psychology of speculators is as valuable as it ever was. Weapons change, but strategy remains strategy, on the New York Stock Exchange as on the battlefield. I think the clearest summing up of the whole thing was expressed by Thomas F. Woodlock when he declared: “The principles of successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people will continue in the future to make the mistakes that they have made in the past.”