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WISDOM FROM BERNARD BARUCH -Evergreen


From the SAME AS IT EVER WAS file: Bernard Baruch, a colleague and friend of Jesse Livermore’s, who made a fortune shorting the 1929 crash, and then who later advised presidents Woodrow Wilson and Franklin D. Roosevelt on economic matters, listed the following investment rules in his autobiography published in 1958 entitled Baruch: My Own Story.  These rules are still as applicable today.


1.  Don’t speculate unless you can make it a full-time job.
2.  Beware of barbers, beauticians, waiters–of anyone–bringing gifts of “inside” information or “tips.”
3.  Before you buy a security, find out everything you can about the company, its management and competitors, its earnings and possibilities for growth.
4.  Don’t try to buy at the bottom and sell at the top.  This can’t be done–except by liars.
5.  Learn how to take your losses quickly and cleanly.  Don’t expect to be right all the time.  If you have made a mistake, cut your losses as quickly as possible.
6.  Don’t buy too many different securities.  Better have only a few investments which can be watched.
7.  Make a periodic reappraisal of all your investments to see whether changing developments have altered their prospects.
8.  Study your tax position to know when you can sell to greatest advantage.
9.  Always keep a good part of your capital in a cash reserve.  Never invest all your funds.
10.  Don’t try to be a jack of all investments.  Stick to the field you know best.

You Never Know When You Will Drop Dead

Arnold Schwarzenegger used to always say — Schwarzenegger, love him, hate him, I don’t necessarily have a feeling one way or the other, but he used to always say that a good pump in his weight-lifting world was as good as sex. I’d say hitting a home run is right there. The point is, getting to the point where you have got it on the line, you’re making something happen, you don’t give a shit what your neighbors think of you. You don’t give a shit what your family thinks of you. You’re just gonna take on the world. That’s it. That’s the goal. You live one time, one time and it’s over. If you go through life scared, if you go through life following the plan that your father told you to do, that your mother told you to do, or some other nonsense society told you to do: you need to get a steady job, you need a college degree, then you get a steady job, yada, yada, yada. Guess what, you’ll be 60, by the time you know it you’ll be 70, maybe you’ll be dead soon.

Stop waiting for the perfect opportunity to start living the way you want to live. 

JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH ON STOCK MARKET MEMORY LOSS

Where else but in the markets can short term memory loss be both beneficial and profitable?

John Kenneth Galbraith, an economist, says the financial markets are characterized by…

“…extreme brevity of the financial memory.  In consequence, financial disaster is quickly forgotten.  In further consequence, when the same or closely similar circumstances occur again, SOMETIMES IN A FEW YEARS, they are hailed by a new, often youthful, and always extremely self-confident generation as a brilliantly innovative discovery in the financial and larger economic world.  There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.” [emphasis mine].