No B/S here!
I started being interested in this when confronted with my first wife’s inherited money back in 1959. What happened then is best expressed in a submission I made to the owner of the TC2000 chart service, a gentleman named Don Worden, who published it on November 17. This is what I said.
November 2, 2004
Dear Don,
I guess we’re about the same age, I was 72 yesterday. Probably went through the same period of discovery. My first wife was left 20 thousand dollars, and she didn’t trust me, gave half to a rich broker who as a fundamentalist bought only Underwood, said it was being taken over by Olivetti, which would become the IBM of Europe. Well it didn’t, and he killed himself and we avoided that solution.
The other half I played with, I bought Darvas’s book “How I made 2 million Dollars in the Stock Market”, which impressed me with its technical approach. I particularly liked how he described that when he didn’t sit in front watching the tape he made money, and when he watched the tape he became a loser. After about 5 years of trading, mostly on the short side (it was the sixties, what rash ones we then were), I finished up about even. When my wife and I parted company, I gave her all our money in shares of Syntex, the new birth control drug. Told her to put it in the bottom drawer and wait. A year later, the holding was worth 2 million dollars. But later, at our divorce hearing, it was revealed that she had never trusted me, and had sold out all the shares the day after I gave them to her!
I remember the day Kennedy was assassinated. I went down to my brokers and watched the tape. It dutifully declined. But the next day it shot up. Seems the market didn’t like Kennedy’s attempt to turn back US Steel’s price increases.
I love the market, because it doesn’t sell b/s. Other voices everywhere tell you what’s what, what to do, and why, and the market quietly goes about its unsentimental business telling it like it is, and it’s always right (eventually). The challenge is how to read it.
The only sage advice I ever saw was that of J.P. Morgan who when asked his secret, famously replied “The market will fluctuate.” So, timing is all. And your charts are the only method I’ve found that tells the story and presents the clues and continues the fascination, at least for me.
Long may we all survive. Thanks.
John Clark