In one of the rush seasons when the stock exchange transactions were running from three to six million shares a day, with the tape lagging an hour or more behind, I knew a man who put in an order to sell a hundred shares short at $190, with a stop loss order at ten points above the purchase price, and an hour or so later, without any advice that the stock had been sold, he got notice that it had been bought in on his “stop” at $200, resulting in a loss of a thousand dollars, plus commission. Next morning, not having received any notice of the short sale, he concluded that in the rush of business the order must have miscarried, and therefore he was long of a hundred shares, on which by the way he had a profit of five points. Shortly after the opening he sold it, and at the same time sold a hundred shares short. Later in the day he got word that his selling order of the day before had been duly executed, but owing to some mixup it had not been promptly reported. This made him three hundred shares short, with the stock climbing a half point or more between sales. Before the close he covered the three hundred shares at a loss of nearly four thousand dollars. The market looked so strong that he decided to recoup his loss on the long side, so he bought two hundred shares. But the following day while the bulls paused for a resting spell the stock slipped back nine points, and being a little upset over the result of his miscalculations, in a fit of disgust he closed out his two hundred shares at an additional loss of seventeen hundred dollars. Next day the bulls again took the stock in hand and advanced it nineteen points. No wonder such maneuvers give traders mental intoxication. The collapse of the Florida real estate boom--which carried down dozens of banks,--the great Mississippi flood, the devastating earthquakes in California, the failure of a hundred or more banks throughout the Northwest and such-like calamities had no more effect on the Wall Street psychology than they would have had in quelling an epidemic of smallpox. Some of the more conservative element, sensing the danger, sold out their stocks, but after discovering their mistake they bought them back at much higher prices and re-joined the procession. Therefore many traders who had preached caution or moderation when the market was thirty, fifty or a hundred points lower, were found consorting with the most rampant bulls at the top. I know a man who sold out his Montgomery Ward at $15.00 a share, and in 1928 after discovering his error in judgment he bought it back at $425.00 a share. It was generally tipped to go to a $1000--but it didn’t. After the November crash he told me he had been “wiped off the map.”