Livingstone lets us look over his views on the type of determination needed to win at this game.

         “A man must believe in himself and his judgment if he is to make a living at this game.”

He gives a few great examples of the hard lessons he learned by going with someone else’s opinion or trading advice. Your own opinion based on your own research, by trying it with money, is the only way to have the confidence to go against everyone else’s advice at the correct time.

He walks us through his learning phases, with the benefit of hindsight added like a mystery story, edging the reader to uncover the source of the self-admitted blind-spot in his trading. What general principal was he ignoring that could be so surely fatal?

“I was dead right and – I lost every cent I had!”
“If the unusual didn’t happen there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn’t be any fun in life.”

The habits he found so successful in the Bucket Shops (Paper Trading) were undoing him a reputable brokers office – yet he could not state his own problem to himself and, of course, he could not solve it. But he did worse than not see his error, he kept on trading. Soon he was broke again, and had to leave New York. Larry adds in a few paragraphs what took him years of experience to realize about the markets. He adds the advice to use market orders for entering and exiting a position rather than limit orders.