The Money Game

What is it the good managers have? It’s a kind of locked-in concentration, an intuition, a feel, nothing that can be schooled. The first thing you have to know is yourself. A man who knows himself can step outside himself and watch his own reactions like an observer.

So let us heed, for a moment, Mr. Gerald Loeb, longstanding champion tape-reader and author of The Battle for Investment Survival: There is no such thing as a final answer to security values. A dozen experts will arrive at 12 different conclusions. It often happens that a few moments later each would alter his verdict if given a chance to reconside

With the good men, you can see the learning juices churning around every mistake. You learn from mistakes. When I look back, my life seems to be an endless chain of mistakes.”

The learned psychiatrist had picked, out of all the thousands of stocks, the one that permitted him to lose every penny. The happy ending is that we may all learn something, because he is still writing his book. It will be out next year, and I can hardly wait, since he saved his insight for publication.

“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 emo

If you don’t know who you are, this is an expensive place to find out.

if you really know what’s going on, you don’t even have to know what’s going on to know what’s going on.

It has taken me years to unlearn everything I was taught, and I probably haven’t succeeded yet. I cite this only because most of what has been written about the market tells you the way it ought to be, and the successful investors I know do not hold to the way it ought to be, they simply go with what is.

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.