Trading Experience Quotes

I started trading around 1979, fresh out of college. In the early '90s, I started guesting for major news media.

Fundamentals might be good for the first third or first 50 or 60 percent of a move, but the last third of a great bull market is typically a blow-off, whereas the mania runs wild and prices go parabolic... There is no training, classroom or otherwise, that can prepare for trading the last third of a move, whether it's the end of a bull market or the end of a bear market.

The first rule of trading - there are probably many first rules - is don't get caught in a situation in which you can lose a great deal of money for reasons you don't understand.

Funny, but after trading for more than 15 years, I still am capable of forgetting a cardinal rule: The paper you own, in the end, will be intertwined with the fate of the 30-year bond.

It seemed glamorous when I used to go into work and get to be on a trading floor or see how the business worked a little bit before I ever understood what it was.

I do not use short selling. The fund has not shorted a stock since the 2002 to 2003 time frame. At that time I did short three stocks, on which I broke even on two and made money on one of them. The experience taught me that I was not going to be using short selling going forward for a slew of reasons.

I started trading stocks, options and futures while I was at UCLA, using my earnings from working summers at the old IBM plant on Cottle Road. I never lost interest in how companies work. It's fundamental to who I am.

The danger that we have right now are people who get the same information as I do and, therefore, think they'll reach the same conclusions that haven't traded as long, don't have bear claws up and down their backs like I do.

Professional traders have always had some system or other based upon their experience and governed either by their attitude towards speculation or by their desires.

It is literally true that millions come easier to a trader after he knows how to trade, than hundreds did in the days of his ignorance.

I am more scared now that I was at any point since I began trading, because I recognize how ephemeral success can be in this business. I know that to be successful, I have to be frightened. My biggest hits have always come after I have had a great period and I started to think that I knew something.

I caught hold of the great bull market in soybeans in 1977. I had no idea what I was doing, incidentally.

There is no training, classroom or otherwise, that can prepare for trading the last third of a move, whether it's the end of a bull market or the end of a bear market.

It takes a man a long time to learn all the lessons of all of his mistakes. They say there are two sides to everything. But there is only one side to the stock market; and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side. It took me longer to get that general principle fixed firmly in my mind than it did most of the more technical phases of the game of stock speculation.

I got into online trading. It was alarmingly easy to do. I went through the whole cycle of emotions, from supreme self-confidence to total impotence. I broke even in the end.

After the first time I got traded - I was in the bullpen warming up for a game in Double A, and I got called back in and got traded - that was probably the, like, most crazy it could be. And once I got traded, the next time it got a little easier, and I got traded the next time - it's just part of it.