The irony is that this is a money game and money is the way we keep score. But the real object of the Game is not money, it is the playing of the Game itself. For the true players, you could take all the trophies away and substitute plastic beads or whale’s teeth; as long as there is a way to keep score, they will play.

Who makes the really big money? The inside stockholders of a company do, when the market capitalizes the earnings of that company.

A stock is for all practical purposes, a piece of paper that sits in a bank vault. Most likely you will never see it. It may or may not have an Intrinsic Value; what it is worth on any given day depends on the confluence of buyers and sellers that day. The most important thing to realize is simplistic: The stock doesn’t know you own it. All those

“You have to use your emotions in a useful way,” says Dr. McArthur. “Your emotions must support the goal you’re after. You can’t have any conflict about what you’re after, and your emotional needs must be gratified by succeeding at what you’re doing. In short, you have to be able to handle any situation without losing your cool, or letting your

Dr. Schelling’s phrasing has to be counted as unfortunate, and in no sense is the stock market a great gambling enterprise like a lottery. But it is an exercise in mass psychology, in trying to guess better than the crowd how the crowd will behave.

“The market,” says Mister Johnson, “is like a beautiful woman—endlessly fascinating, endlessly complex, always changing, always mystifying. I have been absorbed and immersed since 1924 and I know this is no science. It is an art. Now we have computers and all sorts of statistics, but the market is still the same and understanding the market is

A man can break most of the Commandments with impunity, but please, let him not go bust, that will get him ostracized faster than lying, fudging on his income taxes, cheating, adultery, and coveting all the oxes and asses there are.

It may be that a hundred years from now, or even less, the money game played in the securities markets may be seen as a passing phase of capitalism. It may even be seen as Keynes saw it, as a game of musical chairs. Great rewards accrue to the successful, and even though, he said, there will be some without chairs when the music stops, all the

the market has a way of inducing humility in even its most successful students. It is dangerous because to know what you’re doing, you do have to be able to step outside yourself and see yourself objectively, and this is very tough if you think of Comsat as your baby, or even think “That’s mine, and I bought it a lot lower.”