《股票作手回忆录·第十二章·棉花惨败·被专家说服》第17节
While there I did some thinking. It seemed to me that my speculative commitments were overlarge. I am not timid as a rule, but I got to feeling nervous and that made me decide to lighten my load. To do this I must clean up either the cotton or the wheat. It seems incredible that knowing the game as well as I did and with an experience of twelve or fourteen years of speculating in stocks and commodities I did precisely the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out. It was an utterly foolish play, but all I can say in extenuation is that it wasn’t really my deal, but Thomas’. Of all speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game. My cotton deal proved it to the hilt a little later. Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit. That was so obviously the wise thing to do and was so well known to me that even now I marvel at myself for doing the reverse. And so I sold my wheat, deliberately cut short my profit in it. After I got out of it the price went up twenty cents a bushel without stopping. If I had kept it I might have taken a profit of about eight million dollars. And having decided to keep on with the losing proposition I bought more cotton!
注释摘要
这段文字发生在利弗莫尔已经深陷棉花多头泥潭的过程中，他来到湾岸休养，试图在身心俱疲的状态下重新思考自己的投机组合。在1900年代，一个像他这样同时操作大宗商品和股票的大投机者，其账户结构极其复杂，既有巨额的浮动盈亏，也需要维持天文数字的保证金。当他意识到自己的风险敞口过大，决定必须清理头寸来减轻压力时，他面对的是一个在华尔街永恒存在的灵魂拷问：是卖出亏损的…