I not only was long of cotton but I was carrying a heavy line of wheat. That was doing famously and showed me a handsome profit. My fool efforts to bolster up cotton had increased my line to about one hundred and fifty thousand bales. I may tell you that about this time I was not feeling very well. I don’t say this to furnish an excuse for my blunders, but merely to state a pertinent fact. I remember I went to Bayshore for a rest. While there I did some thinking. It seemed to me that my speculative commitments were overlarge. I am not timid as a rule, but I got to feeling nervous and that made me decide to lighten my load. To do this I must clean up either the cotton or the wheat. It seems incredible that knowing the game as well as I did and with an experience of twelve or fourteen years of speculating in stocks and commodities _I did precisely the wrong thing_. _The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out._ It was an utterly foolish play, but all I can say in extenuation is that it wasn’t really my deal, but Thomas’. _Of all speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game._ My cotton deal proved it to the hilt a little later. _Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit._ That was so obviously the wise thing to do and was so well known to me that even now I marvel at myself for doing the reverse. And so I sold my wheat, deliberately cut short my profit in it. After I got out of it the price went up twenty cents a bushel without stopping. If I had kept it I might have taken a profit of about eight million dollars. And having decided to keep on with the losing proposition I bought more cotton! I remember very clearly how every day I would buy cotton, more cotton. And why do you think I bought it? To keep the price from going down! If that isn’t a supersucker play, what is? I simply kept putting up more and more money--more money to lose eventually. My brokers and my intimate friends couldn’t understand it; and they don’t to this day. Of course if the deal had turned out differently I would have been a wonder. More than once I was warned against placing too much reliance on Percy Thomas’ brilliant analyses. To this I paid no heed, but kept on buying cotton to keep it from going down. I was even buying it in Liverpool. I accumulated four hundred and forty thousand bales before I realized what I was doing. And then it was too late. So I sold out my line. I lost nearly all that I had made out of all my other deals in stocks and commodities. I was not completely cleaned out, but I had left fewer hundreds of thousands than I had millions before I met my brilliant friend Percy Thomas. For me of all men to violate all the laws that experience had taught me to observe in order to prosper was more than asinine.