Top 30 Quotes & Sayings by Edwin Lefevre

No man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily - or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play.

The speculators deadly enemies are: Ignorance, greed, fear and hope. All the statute books in the world and all the rules of all the Exchanges on earth cannot eliminate these from the human animal.

the public never is independently responsive to news.

The principles of successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people will continue in the future to make the mistakes that they have made in the past.

When the man who ought to want a stock doesn't want it, why should I want it?

There is no question that advertising is an art, and manipulation is the art of advertising through the medium of the tape.

And for a sucker play a man gets sucker pay; for the paymaster is on the job and never losses the pay envelope that is coming to you.

The game taught me the game.

That is one trouble about trading on a large scale.You cannot sneak out as you can when you pike along.

Being broke is a very efficient educational agency.

As I have said a thousand times, no manipulation can put stocks down and keep them down.

If a stock doesn’t act right don’t touch it; because, being unable to tell precisely what is wrong, you cannot tell which way it is going. No diagnosis, no prognosis. No prognosis, no profit.

A battle goes on in the stock market and the tape is your telescope. You can depend upon it seven out of ten cases.

The public always wants to be told.

It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all of his mistakes. They say there are two sides to everything. But there is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side. It took me longer to get that general principle fixed firmly in my mind than it did most of the more technical phases of the game of stock speculation.

Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street. When you read contemporary accounts of booms or panics, the one thing that strikes you most forcibly is how little either stock speculation or stock speculators today differ from yesterday. The game does not change and neither does human nature.

One of the most helpful things that any body can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth - or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world.

Fear and hope remain the same; therefore the study of the psychology of speculators is as valuable as it ever was. Weapons change, but strategy remains strategy, on the New York Stock Exchange as on the battlefield. I think the clearest summing up of the whole thing was expressed by Thomas F. Woodlock when he declared: “The principles of successful stock speculation are based on the supposition that people will continue in the future to make the mistakes that they have made in the past.”

When you find that it fails to respond adequately to your buying you don't need any better tip to sell.

Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street.

If a man didn't make mistakes he'd own the world in a month.But if he didn't profit by his mistakes he wouldn't own a blessed thing.

In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent.

The big money in booms is always made first by the public - on paper. And it remains on paper.

The speculator is not an investor.

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.

It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!

TIPS! How people want tips! They crave not only to get them but to give them.

When it comes to selling stocks, it is plain that nobody can sell unless somebody wants those stocks.If you operate on a large scale you will have to bear that in mind all the time.

As a matter of fact I trade in accordance to my means and always leave myself an ample margin of safety.

A stock operator has to fight a lot of expensive enemies within himself.