It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting.
— Jesse Lauriston Livermore
Unbelievable Bull Markets quotations
Bull markets are born on pessimism, grown on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell.
Men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon.
It never was my thinking that made the big money for me.
It was always my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight!
Disregarding the big swing and trying to jump in and out was fatal to me.
Nobody can catch all the fluctuations. In a bull market your game is to buy and hold until you believe that the bull market is near its end. To do this you must study general conditions and not tips or special factors affecting individual stocks.
Bull-markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.
The average man doesn't wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market.
What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He does not wish to work. He doesn't even wish to have to think.
The last leg of a bull market always ends in hysteria;
the last leg of a bear market always ends in panic.
There is only one side to the stock market;
and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side
A bull market is like sex. It feels best just before it ends.
Speculators often prosper through ignorance;
it is a cliché that in a roaring bull market knowledge is superfluous and experience is a handicap. But the typical experience of the speculator is one of temporary profit and ultimate loss
A market does not culminate in one grand blaze of glory.
Neither does it end with a sudden reversal of form. A market can and does often cease to be a bull market long before prices generally begin to break.
I caught hold of the great bull market in soybeans in 1977.
I had no idea what I was doing, incidentally.
Historically, there has been a bull market in commodities every 20 or 30 years.
Timidity prompted by past failures causes investors to miss the most important bull markets.
I never hesitate to tell a man that I am bullish or bearish.
But I do not tell people to buy or sell any particular stock. In a bear market all stocks go down and in a bull market they go up.
There are two kinds of investors, be they large or small: those who don't know where the market is headed and those who don't know what they don't know. Then again, there is a third type of investor: the investment professional, who indeed knows he doesn't know, but whose livelihood depends upon appearing to know.
They say you never grow poor taking profits.
No, you don't. But neither do you grow rich taking a four-point profit in a bull market. Where I should have made twenty thousand dollars I made two thousand. That was what conservatism did for me.
Bull markets and Bear markets can obscure mathematical laws, they cannot repeal them.
Bull markets go to people's heads. If you're a duck on a pond, and it's rising due to a downpour, you start going up in the world. But you think it's you, not the pond.
One of the frustrating things for people who miss the first rally in a bull market is that they wait for the big correction and it never comes. The market just keeps climbing and climbing. It feeds on itself in frenzied fashion and propels prices considerably higher for six months or so, and sometimes longer.
...first check whether the market as a whole is rising or falling. In other words, are you in a bull market or bear market? If the latter, stay out. The odds are against you.
There are two kinds of investors, be thay large or small: those who don't know where the market is headed, and those who don't know that they don't know.
Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.
Bull markets are great, but they breed complacency.
Bear markets can be energizing. Instead of fretting over the decline in your net worth, think opportunistically about all those bargains - and the potential gains when, inevitably, a bull market returns.
Too many people are apt to redeem their profits too quickly.
In a huge bull market they wind up with piddling profits, only to watch their former holdings soar. That usually prompts them into making mistakes later when, believing that the market owes them some money, they buy at the wrong time at much higher levels.
The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy.
Whenever the investor sold out in an upswing as soon as the top level of the previous well-recognized bull market was reached, he had a chance in the next bear market to buy back at one third (or better) below his selling price.
I think we're in the beginning of a bull market. When a bull market begins, nine months later the economy turns around.
As the bull market goes on, people who take great risks achieve great rewards, seemingly without punishment. It's like crime without punishment or sex without sin.
Any bull market covers a multitude of sins, so there may be all sorts of problems with the current system that we won't see until the bear market comes.
A crash really occurs when you suddenly have a violent downturn in the market that then heralds a long bull market.
Don't confuse brains with a bull market.
If you roll dice, you know that the odds are one in six that the dice will come up on a particular side. So you can calculate the risk. But, in the stock market, such computations are bull - you don't even know how many sides the dice have!
In a bull market, one must avoid the error of the preening duck that quacks boastfully after a torrential rainstorm, thinking that its paddling skills have caused it to rise in the world. A right-thinking duck would instead compare its position after the downpour to that of the other ducks on the pond.