Even as a lad I always got my own meanings out of such facts as I observed. It is the only way in which the meaning reaches me. I cannot get out of facts what somebody tells me to get. They are my facts, don’t you see? If I believe something you can be sure it is because I simply must. When I am long of stocks it is because my reading of conditions has made me bullish. But you find many people, reputed to be intelligent, who are bullish because they have stocks. I do not allow my possessions--or my prepossessions either--to do any thinking for me. That is why I repeat that I never argue with the tape. To be angry at the market because it unexpectedly or even illogically goes against you is like getting mad at your lungs because you have pneumonia. I had been gradually approaching the full realization of how much more than tape reading there was to stock speculation. Old man Partridge’s insistence on the vital importance of being continuously bullish in a bull market doubtless made my mind dwell on the need above all other things of determining the kind of market a man is trading in. _I began to realize that the big money must necessarily be in the big swing. Whatever might seem to give a big swing its initial impulse, the fact is that its continuance is not the result of manipulations by pools or artifice by financiers, but depends upon basic conditions. And no matter who opposes it, the swing must inevitably run as far and as fast and as long as the impelling forces determine._ After Saratoga I began to see more clearly--perhaps I should say more maturely--that since the entire list moves in accordance with the main current there was not so much need as I had imagined to study individual plays or the behaviour of this or the other stock. Also, by thinking of the swing a man was not limited in his trading. He could buy or sell the entire list. In certain stocks a short line is dangerous after a man sells more than a certain percentage of the capital stock, the amount depending on how, where and by whom the stock is held. But he could sell a million shares of the general list--if he had the price--without the danger of being squeezed. A great deal of money used to be made periodically by insiders in the old days out of the shorts and their carefully fostered fears of corners and squeezes. _Obviously the thing to do was to be bullish in a bull market and bearish in a bear market._ Sounds silly, doesn’t it? But I had to grasp that general principle firmly before I saw that to put it into practice really meant to anticipate probabilities. It took me a long time to learn to trade on those lines. But in justice to myself I must remind you that up to then I had never had a big enough stake to speculate that way. A big swing will mean big money if your line is big, and to be able to swing a big line you need a big balance at your broker’s.