《股票作手回忆录·第十四章·游戏永不变·人性永不变》第1节
It has always rankled in my mind that after I left Williamson & Brown’s office the cream was off the market. We ran smack into a long moneyless period; four mighty lean years. There was not a penny to be made. As Billy Henriquez once said, “It was the kind of market in which not even a skunk could make a scent.” It looked to me as though I was in Dutch with destiny. It might have been the plan of Providence to chasten me, but really I had not been filled with such pride as called for a fall. I had not committed any of those speculative sins which a trader must expiate on the debtor side of the account. I was not guilty of a typical sucker play. What I had done, or, rather, what I had left undone, was something for which I would have received praise and not blame--north of Forty-second Street. In Wall Street it was absurd and costly. But by far the worst thing about it was the tendency it had to make a man a little less inclined to permit himself human feelings in the ticker district. I left Williamson’s and tried other brokers’ offices. In every one of them I lost money. It served me right, because I was trying to force the market into giving me what it didn’t have to give--to wit, opportunities for making money. I did not find any trouble in getting credit, because those who knew me had faith in me. You can get an idea of how strong their confidence was when I tell you that when I finally stopped trading on credit I owed well over one million dollars.
注释摘要
这一段文字是本书最苦涩、也最坦诚的自白之一。杰西·利弗莫尔，透过记者勒菲弗的笔，化身为拉里·利文斯顿，在这里剖开了他投机生涯中一段漫长的荒年。但要理解这苦涩的分量，我们得先回到1910年代初的美国。利文斯顿在上一章与威廉姆森-布朗公司周旋后，恰好撞上了后来被历史学家称为“1910至1914年萧条期”的阶段。这不是华尔街惊心动魄的暴跌恐慌，而是一种更折磨人的…