In his book The Education of a Speculator, Victor Niederhoffer writes: "During my trading career involving many hundreds of billions of dollars and at least 5,000 separate days of entering the fray, I have not had one satisfactory day. When I make money, I always want to kick myself for not being more aggressive. On those all-too-frequent occasions when I lose a dollar, every dollar hurts. And no matter how certain a particular speculation looks, there is always a good likelihood that it will go astray. Frequently, things are not what they seem. A deal that seems too good to be true is likely not to be true." Niederhoffer isn’t the first to warn about the effect of speculation on one’s equanimity. In 1870 William Worthington Fowler wrote: "Let not the hard-working lawyer, the burdened and anxious merchant, or the hardy sons of manual labour, envy the gilded speculator…. One day he is lifted to dizzy heights, the next, plunged into black depths. "He is hurried through dark labyrinths...
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