MICHEL PIREU: Successful market trading boils down to an even temperament
Eternal pessimists and optimists find it difficult to change behaviour, which can result in terrible investment decisions
“One cannot but pity the man with sallow face and sluggish gait,” Henry Clews wrote in 1908, “who, when everybody else is feeling the happy impulse of a common prosperity, persists in believing that the country is going to the dogs, and steadily sells stocks while everybody else is buying them. He is simply ruining himself through unconsciousness that he views everything through bilious spectacles.
“Equally is the man to be commiserated who, from a constitutional intoxication of hope, keeps on buying and holding when it is manifest that the country has passed the summit of an era of prosperity and is destined to a general reaction in trade and values. Of course, such men never remain long in Wall Street.”..
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