STREET DOGS

In his book The Education of a Speculator, Victor Niederhoffer writes: “During my trading career involving many hundreds of billions of dollars and at least 5,000 separate days of entering the fray, I have not had one satisfactory day. When I make money, I always want to kick myself for not being more aggressive. On those all-toofrequent occasions when I lose a dollar, every dollar hurts. And no matter how certain a particular speculation looks, there is always a good likelihood that it will go astray. Frequently, things are not what they seem. A deal that seems too good to be true is likely not to be true.”

Niederhoffer isn’t the first to warn about the effect of speculation on one’s equanimity. In 1870 William Worthington Fowler wrote: “Let not the hardworking lawyer, the burdened and anxious merchant, or the hardy sons of manual labour, envy the gilded speculator…. One day he is lifted to dizzy heights, the next, plunged into black depths.

“He is hurried through dark labyrinths where a single step is destruction. He climbs on the edge of a sword to a fool’s paradise, where he tastes joys brief as a dream, and in an hour is abased to the earth where he drinks the full cup of humiliation and want.

“Blacksmiths’ sparks flicker before his eyes. His blood regurgitates to his heart, which beats on his ribs like a triphammer. Paralysis, apoplexy and aneurysm are watching for their prey. Not long since, a great man of the street lay for weeks in the clutches of this last disease, and the muffled door-bell told the results of this harrowing career of a speculator. When he died, he left millions. But he had paid for this colossal fortune with a life worn out in middle age by the weary burdens and sharp vicissitudes of the stock market.”