It looked as if the market were doing its best to make me go back to my old and simple ways of bucket-shop trading. _It was the first time I had worked with a definite forward-looking plan embracing the entire market instead of one or two stocks._ I figured that I must win if I held out. Of course at that time I had not developed my system of placing my bets or I would have put out my short line on a declining market, as I explained to you the last time. I would not then have lost so much of my margin. _I would have been wrong but not hurt._ You see, I had observed certain facts but had not learned to co-ordinate them. My incomplete observation not only did not help but actually hindered. _I have always found it profitable to study my mistakes._ Thus I eventually discovered that it was all very well not to lose your bear position in a bear market, but that at all times the tape should be read to determine the propitiousness of the time for operating. If you begin right you will not see your profitable position seriously menaced; and then you will find no trouble in sitting tight. Of course to-day I have greater confidence in the accuracy of my observations--in which neither hopes nor hobbies play any part--and also I have greater facilities for verifying my facts as well as for variously testing the correctness of my views. But in 1906 the succession of rallies dangerously impaired my margins. I was nearly twenty-seven years old. I had been at the game twelve years. _But the first time I traded because of a crisis that was still to come I found that I had been using a telescope._ Between my first glimpse of the storm cloud and the time for cashing in on the big break the stretch was evidently so much greater than I had thought that I began to wonder whether I really saw what I thought I saw so clearly. _We had had many warnings and sensational ascensions in call-money rates._ Still some of the great financiers talked hopefully--at least to newspaper reporters--and the ensuing rallies in the stock market gave the lie to the calamity howlers. Was I fundamentally wrong in being bearish or merely temporarily wrong in having begun to sell short too soon? I decided that I began too soon, but that I really couldn’t help it. Then the market began to sell off. That was my opportunity. I sold all I could, and then stocks rallied again, to quite a level. It cleaned me out. There I was--right and busted!