Investors, Drive Down Wall Street with Care!
With all the hullabaloo about speculation, an amateur investor may naturally assume that Wall Street is strictly for gamblers. This is a great pity, because probably a long-term investor can get better results in the stock market than elsewhere, provided he follows a few fairly simple rules. Also, it would help in the public understanding of how free enterprise, and especially big business, is owned, if more of our non-gambling citizens participated in owning corporate stocks.
Let us compare stockholders with motor-vehicle drivers. Every year automobiles, trucks, and their drivers cause a fantastic number of deaths and personal injuries, not to mention property damage. The great majority of drivers are careful at least nearly all of the time! Most accidents are caused by a comparatively small number of careless and reckless drivers. A cautious citizen, knowing that he or his family may be the victims of the next accident, could conceivably protect himself by refusing to use motor highways. But the trouble is that motor vehicles save us so much time and energy, and give us so much pleasure when used sanely, that we know their good qualities far outweigh the bad. So we continue to drive, and to hope that the wild drivers will behave, while in our vicinity! In Wall Street, the speculators, in spite of the commotion they raise, are only part of the community, the same as the reckless drivers on the highways. And in contrast to the highway problem, a cautious amateur can invest in such a manner that he runs low risk of having his finances wrecked by the gambler mindset.
Traditionally, being an equity owner of business involves serious risk, sometimes complete failure. An investor, knowing the instances of bad results in small business ventures, may assume that in buying corporate stock he must expect to run somewhat comparable risks, and so he makes no attempt to learn how to reduce the danger. Apparently a great many shareholders have attitudes more or less like this. They may not want to gamble, but they don’t bother even to inquire how Wall Street investment risks could be lowered. A serious market investor, wanting to avoid gambling in stock investments, must do some serious investing thoughts. The 8 main ideas for reducing the risks are mentioned below: (more…)