Quotes from Edwin Lefevre

The beauty of doing business with a crook is that he always forgives you for catching him, so long as you don't stop doing business with him.

One of the most helpful things that anybody 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. They have cost stock traders, in the aggregate, enough millions of dollars to build a concrete highway across the continent.

The Street paid no attention to the earthquake the first day or two. They'll tell you that it was because the first despatches were not so alarming, but I think it was because it took so long to change the point of view of the public toward the securities markets.

Now, the point is not so much to buy as cheap as possible or go short at top prices, but to buy or sell at the right time.

I never want to buy stocks too cheap or too easily.

there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time. No man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily—or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play. I proved it.

Experience has taught me that the way a market behaves is an excellent guide for an operator to follow. It is like taking a patient's temperature and pulse or noting the colour of the eye-balls and the coating of the tongue.

I do not allow my possessions—or my prepossessions either—to do any thinking for me.

I trade in accordance to my means and always leave myself an ample margin of safety.

My long expected warning came to me when I noticed that, one after another, those stocks which had been the leaders of the market reacted several points from the top and—for the first time in many months—did not come back. Their race evidently was run, and that clearly necessitated a change in my trading tactics.

I never buy a stock even in a bull market, if it doesn't act as it ought to act in that kind of market.

You cannot be dead sure of anything in a speculative operation. It was the experience I have just told you that made me add the unexpectable to the unexpected in my list of hazards.

Experiences had taught me to beware of buying a stock that refuses to follow the group-leader.

The tipster-promoter labours under the delusion that no human being breathes who can resist a tip if properly delivered. He studies the art of handing them out artistically.

That is how I came to learn that even when one is properly bearish at the very beginning of a bear market it is well not to begin selling in bulk until there is no danger of the engine back-firing.

They are still angry. I am not. Getting angry doesn't get a man anywhere. More than once it has been borne in on me that a speculator who loses his temper is a goner.

The beauty of doing business with a crook is that he always forgives you for catching him, so long as you don't stop doing business with him.

Carefully laid plans will miscarry because the unexpected and even the unexpectable will happen.

I have found an easy way and I stick to it. I simply cannot help making money. I will tell you my secret if you wish. It is this: I never buy at the bottom and I always sell too soon.

After the Great War broke out in Europe there began the rise in the prices of commodities that was to be expected. It was as easy to foresee that as to foresee war inflation.

The speculator's deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope.

Everybody knew that the way to do that was to take profits and buy back your stocks on reactions. And that is precisely what I did, or rather what I tried to do; for I often took profits and waited for a reaction that never came. And I saw my stock go kiting up ten points more and I sitting there with my four-point profit safe in my conservative pocket. They say you never grow poor taking profits. No, you don't. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market.

Observation, experience, memory and mathematics -- these are what the successful trader must depend on.

If you do not know who you are, the stock market is an expensive place to find out.