Here are some nice numbers:

1. A Python can survive quite happily on 1 good victim per year. (Finally proving there’s a difference between snakes and stockbrokers.)
2. According to an old Chinese proverb, there are only 2 types of good people: the dead and the unborn. (So that’s more bad news for stockbrokers then!)
3. During the 1890s, Emperor Menelek II of Ethiopia was told about electric chairs, and he promptly ordered 3 as a neat way of disposing of undesirables. Unfortunately, he didn’t realize that before you could kill people with them, you needed an electricity supply – which Ethiopia hadn’t quite got round to. The ever-resourceful Menelek put one of the chairs to use as his new imperial throne.
4. 4 record companies turned down the Beatles before they were signed to Parlaphone. (Most businesses stay in business by minimizing risks - take heed beginning traders. Too much risk-minimization can lead to under-performance - take heed experienced traders.)
5. Jesse Livermore says it took him 5 years to learn to enough about stock market speculation to make big money when he was right.
6. In 1932 the Soviet Union ruled that there should be only 6 days per week.
7. A mediaeval superstition from Central Europe says a woman can regain her virginity by bearing 7 bastard children. (I heard an analyst say something similar about one of his stocks last week.)
8. In pre-Christian times, there were 8 days in the Graeco-Roman week.
9. An old Turkish proverb seems to have been designed to offend everybody: “Among any 10 men, 9 are women.”
10. The British press tycoon Lord Northcliffe put notices up in his office, saying: “They are only 10.” It helped remind him of the mental age of his newspapers’ readers.

I love numbers. Nine of the number facts above are from A Book of Numbers by John Grant. One is from Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.

In How to Trade in Stocks, Jesse Livermore discussed “the folly of trying to find out a good reason why you should buy or sell a given stock.”

He wrote in the context of the behavior of U.S. stocks, whose four major sectors - including steel makers - had risen after World War 2 began. While other sectors continued to advance, U.S. steel stocks stopped rising.

Livermore wrote that there must have been a good reason why the steel stocks had stopped rising but he didn’t know what it was.

It was not until four months later that the public was given the facts and the action of the steel stocks - which had by now fallen 26 to 29 points - was finally explained. The British and Canadian governments had been selling large volumes of shares in U.S. steel makers. (Presumably to fund their war efforts.)

“If you wait until you have the reason given, you will have missed the opportunity of acting at the proper time!

“The only reason an investor or speculator should ever want to have pointed out to him is the action of the market itself.

“Whenever the market does not act right or in the way it should - that is reason enough for you to change your opinion and change it immediately.

“Remember: there is always a reason for a stock acting the way it does.

“But also remember: the chances are that you will not become acquainted with that reason until some time in the future, when it is too late to act on it profitably.”