“Few human activities have been exhaustively studied during the past fifty years, from so many angles and by so many different sorts of people, as has the buying and selling of corporate securities.  The rewards which the stock market holds out to those who read it right are enormous; the penalties it exacts from careless, dozing, or “unlucky” investors are calamitous-no wonder it has attracted some of the world’s most astute accountants, analysts, and researchers, along with a motley crew of eccentrics, mystics and “hunch players,” and a multitude of just ordinary hopeful citizens.

Able brains have sought, and continue constantly to seek, for safe and sure methods of appraising the state and trend of the market, of discovering the right stock to buy and the right time to buy it.  This intensive research has not been fruitless-far from it.  There are a great may successful investors and speculators (using the word in its true sense which is without opprobrium) who, by one road or another, have acquired the necessary insight into the forces with which they deal and the judgment, the forethought and the all-important self-discipline to deal with them profitably.”