Of course, when I found that morning a market in which I could sell
out all my stocks without any trouble I did so. When you are selling
out it is no wiser or braver to sell fifty shares than fifty thousand;
but fifty shares you can sell in the dullest market without breaking
the price and fifty thousand shares of a single stock is a different
proposition. I had seventy-two thousand shares of U.S. Steel. This may
not seem a colossal line, but you can’t always sell that much without
losing some of that profit that looks so nice on paper when you figure
it out and that hurts as much to lose as if you actually had it safe in
the bank.
I had a total profit of about $1,500,000 and I grabbed it while the
grabbing was good. But that wasn’t the principal reason for thinking
that I did the right thing in selling out when I did. The market proved
it for me and that was indeed a source of satisfaction for me. It was
this way: I succeeded in selling my entire line of seventy-two thousand
shares of U.S. Steel at a price which averaged me just one point from
the top of the day and of the movement. It proved that I was right, to
the minute. But when, on the very same hour of the very same day I came
to sell my 5000 shares of Utah Copper, the price broke five points.
Please recall that I began buying both stocks at the same time and that
I acted wisely in increasing my line of U.S. Steel from twenty thousand
shares to seventy-two thousand, and equally wisely in not increasing
my line of Utah from the original 5000 shares. The reason why I didn’t
sell out my Utah Copper before was that I was bullish on the copper
trade and it was a bull market in stocks and I didn’t think that Utah
would hurt me much even if I didn’t make a killing in it. But as for
hunches, there weren’t any.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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