I just finished reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, by Edwin Lefèvre, a book I mentioned in one of my two Mother Lode posts back in August. This is a fairly well known book, but there were two passages I wanted to point out that stuck in my head. The first was regarding bull markets in stocks:
“It made me remember a saying of the late H. H. Rogers, of the Standard Oil Company, to the effect that there were times when a man could no more help making money than he could help getting wet if he went out in a rainstorm without an umbrella.”
Oh how true as all the analysts and funds devoted to Commodity and Energy investing have now found out.
The second passage was regarding speculation and human nature:
“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.”
There has been a lot of talk about re regulating our financial markets so the mess we are in does not repeat again. Regulators should remember the above passage and understand that human nature can’t be regulated.
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