In any broker’s office you will notice that a large part of the talk concerns the profits and losses of the traders. Brown had a profit of ten points and then let it get away from him. “Great Scott!” says his wise friend. “What do you want? Aren’t you satisfied with ten points profit?” The reply should be, though it rarely is, “Certainly not, if I think the market is going higher.” “Get them out with a small profit,” I once heard one broker say to another. “If you don’t they will hang on and take a loss. They never get profit enough to satisfy them.” A good policy, probably, if neither the broker nor his customer had any real knowledge of the market; but mere nonsense for the trader who aims to be in the slightest degree scientific. The fact is that the more a trader allows his mind to dwell upon his own position in the market the more likely it is that his judgment will become warped so that his mind is blind to those considerations which do not fall in with his preconceived opinion. Until you try it, you have almost no idea of the extent to which you may be rendered unreasonable by the mere fact that you are committed to one side of the market. “In the market, to be consistent is to be stubborn,” some one has said; and it is true that the man of strong will and logical intellect is often less successful than the more shallow and volatile observer, who is ready to whiffle about like the weathercock at any suspicion of a change in the wind. This is because the strong man has in this instance embarked upon an enterprise where he cannot use his natural force and determination—he can employ only his faculties of observation and interpretation. Yet in the end the man of character will be the more permanently successful, because he will eventually master his subject more thoroughly and attain a more judicial attitude. The more simple-minded, after once committing themselves to a position, are thereafter chiefly influenced and supported by the illusions of hope. They bought, probably, as a result of some bullish development. If prices have advanced, they find that the market “looks strong,” a good deal of encouraging news comes out on the tickers, and they hope for large profits. After five points in their favor, they hope for ten, and after ten they look for fifteen or twenty. On the other hand, if prices decline they charge it to “manipulation,” “bear raids,” etc., and expect an early recovery. Much of the bear news appears to them to be put out maliciously, in order to cause prices to decline further. It is not until the decline begins to cause a painful encroachment upon their capital that they reach the point of saying, “If ‘they’ can depress prices like this in the face of a bullish situation, what is the use of fighting them? By a flood of short sales, they can put prices down as much as they like”—or something of the sort.