Edwin Lefevre Quotes

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.

If a stock doesn’t act right don’t touch it; because, being unable to tell precisely what is wrong, you cannot tell which way it is going. No diagnosis, no prognosis. No prognosis, no profit.

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 never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!

Being broke is a very efficient educational agency.

It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets. I've known many men who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine--that is, they made no real money out of it. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.

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.

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.

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.”

The game taught me the game.

The public always wants to be told.

The big money in booms is always made first by the public - on paper. And it remains on paper.

If a man didn't make mistakes he'd own the world in a month.But if he didn't profit by his mistakes he wouldn't own a blessed thing.

Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street. When you read contemporary accounts of booms or panics, the one thing that strikes you most forcibly is how little either stock speculation or stock speculators today differ from yesterday. The game does not change and neither does human nature.

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