《股票作手回忆录·第三章·初到纽约·对赌行的赢法为何失灵》第10节
Everything happened as I had foreseen. I was dead right and--I lost every cent I had! I was wiped out by something that was unusual. If the unusual never happened there would be no difference in people and then there wouldn’t be any fun in life. The game would become merely a matter of addition and subtraction. It would make of us a race of bookkeepers with plodding minds. It’s the guessing that develops a man’s brain power. Just consider what you have to do to guess right. The market fairly boiled, as I had expected. The transactions were enormous and the fluctuations unprecedented in extent. I put in a lot of selling orders at the market. When I saw the opening prices I had a fit, the breaks were so awful. My brokers were on the job. They were as competent and conscientious as any; but by the time they executed my orders the stocks had broken twenty points more. The tape was way behind the market and reports were slow in coming in by reason of the awful rush of business. When I found out that the stocks I had ordered sold when the tape said the price was, say, 100 and they got mine off at 80, making a total decline of thirty or forty points from the previous night’s close, it seemed to me that I was putting out shorts at a level that made the stocks I sold the very bargains I had planned to buy. The market was not going to drop right through to China. So I decided instantly to cover my shorts and go long.
注释摘要
这段文字发生在1901年5月9日，华尔街历史上最著名的恐慌日之一。拉里·利文斯顿刚刚拿到他在纽约赚到的第一笔大钱，将近五万美元。对一个几个月前还在同一间办公室赔光所有的年轻人来说，这是一笔了不起的财富。他判断市场因为摩根和哈里曼两大财团争夺北太平洋铁路的控制权，必然会发生一场惨烈的暴跌，然后迅速反弹。他的方向判断完全正确，市场确实如他所料地狂泻。但最终，他…