“Say, deacon,” said the tipster, “won’t you please sell mine when you sell yours? I don’t know as much as I thought I did.” That’s the theory. _That is why I never buy stocks cheap._ Of course I always try to buy effectively--in such a way as to help my side of the market. When it comes to selling stocks, it is plain that nobody can sell unless somebody wants those stocks. If you operate on a large scale you will have to bear that in mind all the time. A man studies conditions, plans his operations carefully and proceeds to act. He swings a pretty fair line and he accumulates a big profit--on paper. Well, that man can’t sell at will. You can’t expect the market to absorb fifty thousand shares of one stock as easily as it does one hundred. He will have to wait until he has a market there to take it. There comes the time when he thinks the requisite buying power is there. When that opportunity comes he must seize it. As a rule he will have been waiting for it. _He has to sell when he can, not when he wants to._ To learn the time, he has to watch and test. It is no trick to tell when the market can take what you give it. But in starting a movement it is unwise to take on your full line unless you are convinced that conditions are exactly right. _Remember that stocks are never too high for you to begin buying or too low to begin selling. But after the initial transaction, don’t make a second unless the first shows you a profit. Wait and watch._ That is where your tape reading comes in--to enable you to decide as to the proper time for beginning. _Much depends upon beginning at exactly the right time._ It took me years to realize the importance of this. It also cost me some hundreds of thousands of dollars. I don’t mean to be understood as advising persistent pyramiding. _A man can pyramid and make big money that he couldn’t make if he didn’t pyramid; of course._ But what I meant to say was this: Suppose a man’s line is five hundred shares of stock. I say that he ought not to buy it all at once; not if he is speculating. If he is merely gambling the only advice I have to give him is, don’t! Suppose he buys his first hundred, and that promptly shows him a loss. Why should he go to work and get more stock? He ought to see at once that he is in wrong; at least temporarily. _VIII_ The Union Pacific incident in Saratoga in the summer of 1906 made me more independent than ever of tips and talk--that is, of the opinions and surmises and suspicions of other people, however friendly or however able they might be personally. Events, not vanity, proved for me that I could read the tape more accurately than most of the people about me. I also was better equipped than the average customer of Harding Brothers in that I was utterly free from speculative prejudices. The bear side doesn’t appeal to me any more than the bull side, or vice versa. My one steadfast prejudice is against being wrong.