Another source of losses in speculation lies in the speculator not holding back a cash reserve sufficient to protect him against an adverse course of prices. Ordinarily, the man who speculates is of a sanguine temperament, and apt to take risks without sufficient provision against contingencies. Hence, it is common with inexperienced operators to use all their available resources in their original margin. The result is that, if prices go against them, they are liable to be closed out and saddled with a loss they can ill afford. Such persons should never pledge more than one-half of their available means at the beginning of a transaction; the remaining half should be kept as a guarantee against their being “sold out,” or to enable them to duplicate the transaction at the changed price, so as to make an average likely to yield a profit. The violation of this rule creates a class of weak holders, who offer a constant inducement to “room-traders” to raid the market; knowing, as they do, that when they have impaired these unsupported margins, there is sure to be a rush of selling orders calculated to break down prices. It is safe to say that if better provisions were made for keeping margins good, the power of the “bears” and the wreckers would be broken; one-half of the losses of “outside” operators would be obviated, and one-half the risks of speculation would be obliterated. Another class especially exposed to losses are those who always operate in the same direction. Wall Street has its optimists and pessimists; they are such from a constitutional bent; and they are “bull” or “bear” in season and out of season. As a rule, those that follow a natural disposition, rather than the course of the market and the conditions that mould it, are sure to bankrupt themselves sooner or later. I do not mean to maintain that there is no chance for an operator who clings continuously to one side of the market; for in times when conditions favor higher prices there is always some profitable work to be done by the “bear” in checking excesses of a rise; and, when events favor decline, the “bull” may find his chances in intervals of excessive decline. But the man who can thus successfully steer his craft against the winds and the tides must be a thoroughly trained navigator, cool in temperament, capable of reining his natural proclivities, and above all, the possessor of means large enough to control, if necessary, the course of the market by sheer money power. It is needless to say that nine-tenths of this stereotyped class are devoid of these requisites to success. One cannot but pity the man with sallow face and sluggish gait so suggestive of the blue pill, who, when everybody else is feeling the happy impulse of a common prosperity, persists in believing that the country is going to the dogs, and steadily sells stocks while everybody else is buying them. He is simply ruining himself through unconsciousness that he views everything through bilious spectacles.