Ye Outside Fools!; Glimpses Inside the London Stock Exchange (Paperback)

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTBE VII. MR. NATHANIEL SEESAW WARNS ERASMUS PINTO AGAINST SPECULATING IN UNSAFE STOCKS. " Of course you will occasionally speculate yourself. To do this safely you must follow principles, not ideas, or even with your superior knowledge of the business and -better information, you will be ruined. If you take my advice you will never buy a share in a mine, English or Foreign. The really good English mines scarcely ever come upon the market, and good foreign mines more seldom still. Even if a really good mine is worked by a public company, just as a good racehorse is sometimes not allowed to win, so it is not allowed to turn out well. Such prizes as Cape Copper, Devon Consols, Van, and St. John Del Eey are the baits which catch the ' Outside Fools, ' who forget that among the thousands of utter failures these are the only prizes. Take no shares in industrial companies, unless fully acquainted with the concern. Success here depends upon the management, often upon a single manager's honesty, business capacity, or sobriety. Cable shares are as yet in their infancy, and should only be touched by rich men who can afford and ought to pay for the experiments of science. Any day a new cable may be invented that may do its work much better and cost half the money. Still they are dangerous to bear, for the reason that the persons who now hold most of them are powerful and rich. Foreign governments, with the exception of France, Eussia, the United States, Portugal, and one or two others, onlypay their interest by fresh borrowing; and as the above-mentioned countries' Bonds only pay an average of five per cent. on the price, with some not inconsiderable chance of a depreciation, I cannot see the use of buying them. A great deal of fuss was made about the honorable way in which Eussia p...