Operations based on “tips” or “charts” will lead to final disaster. This thing of trying to attribute habits to a market is, in the writer’s opinion, ridiculous. The movements of prices are caused by events. We know that in periods of financial stringency or business depression prices fall, and in periods of inflation and good times prices rise. It is possible to formulate a system founded on repetitions applicable to every game of chance, and laid out on paper, that system will appear infallible. You can find the exponents of machine-made riches in every pool-room and gambling house in the country. They all eventually lose and there is nothing to show that the advocates of charts as a basis for stock trading ever fared any better. Imagine James R. Keene, or J. P. Morgan poring over a chart and operating thereon. Even if the market did have habits, as soon as these habits were recognized and followed by a sufficient number of people, the technical position would be rendered so rotten that the charts would fail from that influence alone. Charts, employed as a convenient method of picturing the past, may have a certain value, but used as a basis for trading they are an evidence of laziness or incapacity, or both. It requires hard work to be successful in any line. Thinking is hard work, study is hard work, research is hard work; and it is infinitely easier to bet on repetitions all nicely laid out in crooked lines on a sheet of paper than to laboriously erect sound deductions; but the difference in the two methods is that one will succeed and the other will fail. We may also resort to the ultimatum employed by those eminent citizens who punch each other’s noses in a prize-ring, i.e., tell the chart-players to “go and get a reputation.” When they can show even one instance of a fortune accumulated by this method their cause will be greatly strengthened. In the exception taken to Mr. Dow’s theory of $2,500 being the minimum amount necessary for operations in small lots, nothing could be further from the present writer’s intentions than to recommend transactions on insufficient margin. What is sought is merely the truth. The contention that it is wise to stimulate extreme conservatism will not hold. If the naming of a certain sum far in excess of real needs is praiseworthy, we may expand the matter indefinitely and name $5,000 or even $10,000, as the limit. But on the other hand, errors on the side of prudence are vastly preferable to errors on the side of rashness. In this as in all other things, the golden mean is the really desirable factor.