Most investors just want to get something for nothing or windfall

Average people just want to get something for nothing, easy money, or windfall everyone know that. Most people just want to reap what they sow, while stock market investors only want to gain without effort. This is a well-known and timeless law.

Table of Contents

People don’t want to put effort

In the opening of the first chapter of his book, “How to Trade in Stocks“, Jesse Livermore wrote the following:

The game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world. But it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, the man of inferior emotional balance, nor for the get-rich-quick adventurer. They will die poor.
Over a long period of years I have rarely attended a dinner party including strangers that someone did not sit down beside me and after the usual pleasantries inquire:

“How can I make some money in the market?” In my younger days I would go to considerable pains to explain all the difficulties faced by the one who simply wishes to take quick and easy money out of the market; or through courteous evasiveness I would work my way out of the snare. In later years my answer has been a blunt ‘I don’t know.”

It is difficult to exercise patience with such people. In the first place, the inquiry is not a compliment to the man who has made a scientific study of investment and speculation. It would be as fair for the layman to ask an attorney or a surgeon: “How can I make some quick money in law or surgery?”

Touted stocks and insider information is the evidence

In my third book on US stock investment, “Investors Beautiful Heaven”, I mentioned: “Most people believe insider information is useful. Investors pursue insider information simply to get rich quick and dream of overnight wealth. But in investing, most things that make you feel comfortable or what most people are doing are usually not profitable. Things that make you feel good are usually wrong.”

The Delusion of “Getting Rich Quick”

I advise lazy investors or those who want to get rich quick to leave the stock market as soon as possible, because you can’t make big money. After all, stock market investing is no different from spending time working. Jesse Livermore said in book Reminiscences of a Stock Operator:

But 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. It is too much bother to have to count the money that he picks up from the ground.

Beware of inside information

Jesse Livermore In his book How to Trade in Stocks, Livermore wrote:

“On the first page of this little book I suggest you write—no, better print—it in ink: “Beware of inside information -all inside information.”

It cannot be said too often that in speculation and investment, success comes only to those who work for it. No one is going to hand you a lot of easy money. It is like the story of the penniless tramp. His hunger gave him the audacity to enter a restaurant and order “a big, luscious, thick, juicy steak,” and, he added to the colored waiter, “tell your boss to make it snappy.”

In a moment the waiter ambled back and whined: “De boss say if he had dat steak here he’d eat it hisself.”

And if there was any easy money lying around, no one would be forcing it into your pocket.”

Closing words

To achieve great success or satisfactory returns in investing, one must dedicate the same effort as one would to a job, treating it as a career and committing fully. No one in human history has ever succeeded in the stock market with a gambling mentality, hoping for easy money, just want to get something for nothing, or windfall gains.

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