by Edwin Lefevre

• The tape does not concern itself with the why and wherefore. It doesn’t go into explanations… The reason for what a certain stock does today may not be known for two or three days, or weeks, or months. But what the dickens does that matter? Your business with the tape is now–not tomorrow. The reason can wait. But you must act instantly or be left.
• And right here let me say one thing: After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight! It is no trick at all to be right on the market. You always find lots of early bulls in bull markets and early bears in bear markets. I’ve known many men who were right at exactly the right time, and began buying or selling stocks when prices were at the very level which should show the greatest profit. And their experience invariably matched mine that is, they made no real money out of it. Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn.
• What beat me was not having brains enough to stick to my own game – that is, to play the market only when I was satisfied that precedents favoured my play.  There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is also the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time.  No man can have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily – or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play.
• If somebody had told me my method would not work I nevertheless would have tried it out to make sure for myself, for when I am wrong only one thing convinces me of it, and that is, to lose money.  And I am only right when I make money.  That is speculating.
• They say you never go broke taking profits.  No, you don’t.  But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market.
• I think it was a long step forward in my trading education when I realised at last that when old Mr Partridge kept on telling other customers, “Well, you know this is a bull market!” he really meant to tell them that the big money was not in the individual fluctuations but in the main movements-that is, not in reading the tape but in sizing up the entire market and its trend. 
• The market does not beat them.  They beat themselves, because though they have brains they cannot sit tight.  Old Turkey was dead right in doing and saying what he did.  He had not only the courage of his convictions but also the intelligence and patience to sit tight. 
• Disregarding the big swing and trying to jump in and out was fatal to me.  Nobody can catch all the fluctuations.  In a bull market the game is to buy and hold until you believe the bull market is near its end. 
• Remember that stocks are never too high for you to begin buying or too low to begin selling.
• Losing money is the least of my troubles.  A loss never troubles me after I take it.  I forget it overnight.  But being wrong – not taking the loss – that is what does the damage to the pocket book and to the soul. 
• It sounds very easy to say that all you have to do is to watch the tape, establish your resistance points and be ready to trade along the line of least resistance as soon as you have determined it.  But in actual practice a man has to guard against many things, and most of all against himself – that is, against human nature.
• Fear keeps you from making as much money as you ought to.
• The game does not change and neither does human nature.
• I trade on my own information and follow my own methods.
• He was utterly fearless but never reckless.  He could, and did, turn on a twinkling if he found he was wrong. 
• The speculator’s deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope.  All the statue books in the world and all the rule books on all the Exchanges of the earth cannot eliminate these from the human animal
• I sometimes think that speculation must be an unnatural sort of business, because I find that the average speculator has arrayed against his own nature.  The weaknesses that all men are prone to are fatal to success in speculation – usually those very weaknesses that make him likable to his fellows or that he himself particularly guards against in those other ventures of his where they are not nearly so dangerous as when he is trading in commodities or stocks. 
• The public ought always to keep in mind the elementals of stock trading.  When a stock is going up no elaborate explanation is needed as to why it is going up.  It takes continuous buying to make a stock keep going up.  As long as it does so, with only small and natural reactions from time to time, it is a pretty safe proposition to trail with it. 
• But if after a long steady rise a stock turns and gradually begins to go down, with only occasionally small rallies, it is obvious that the line of least resistance has changed from upward to downward.  Such being the case why should anyone ask for explanations?