Are you aware that in catering to your instinct to "invest," methods to get you to part with your money are so artfully and deftly applied by the highest that they deceive you completely? Could you imagine it to be a fact that in nearly all cases when you find you are ready to embark on a given speculation, ways and means that are almost scientific in their insidiousness have been used upon you?
What are these impalpable yet cunningly devised tricks that are calculated to fool the wisest and which landed YOU? I narrate them herein.
What are your chances of winning in any speculation where you play another man's game? HAVE YOU ANY CHANCE AT ALL?
In playing the horse races in years past you had only one chance if you persisted—YOU COULD LOSE.
In margin-trading on the New York Stock Exchange, New York Curb, Boston Stock Exchange, Boston Curb, Chicago Board of Trade, Chicago Stock Exchange, New York Cotton Exchange and kindred institutions, experience among stock-brokers proves that if you stick to the game you have only one chance—YOU CAN LOSE.
In railroad, industrial and mining-stock speculation, where you buy the shares outright and hold them for stock market profits, you have two chances; if you are of the average and your operations are for a period continuous—YOU CAN BREAK EVEN IF YOU ARE VERY LUCKY, OR LOSE IF YOU ARE NOT; and in justice to myself I must be allowed to explain that I had a much better opinion of the public's chances ten years ago than I have now, and that experience on the inside has taught me this.
The moral to the investor and speculator is "Never Again!" And yet you WILL speculate again. Experience teaches that so long as the chance of speculative gain exists in any enterprise, so long will the American public continue in its efforts to appease its speculative appetite.
G. G. R.
MY ADVENTURES WITH YOUR MONEY