be made by buying on conservative margin and
by selling short when all the conditions are in favor of it.

While there are possibilities of making extremely large profits without
taking great risks, by those who are patient and exercise good judgment,
one should be satisfied with a small profit, if it is the result of
great care, in an effort to eliminate risk. Of course, you can afford to
take a much greater risk with a small part of your speculative fund than
you can with all of it. The less money you have with which to speculate,
the more careful you should be. Some people cannot afford to speculate
at all. They should invest their funds in good, safe investments, but
this book is written for speculators.

Careful stock speculation carried on regularly over a period of years,
we believe brings larger returns than almost anything else, and in the
next chapter we tell you something about where to get information to
guide you.

CHAPTER XXV.

MARKET INFORMATION

Where do you get your market information? Perhaps most people get it
from the daily papers. When you look over the financial news of one of
the leading metropolitan papers and see how much there is of it, you can
get some idea of the enormous volume of work necessary to get this
matter ready for the press in a few hours. There is no time to confirm
reports. It is necessary that many of the articles be written from pure
imagination, based on rumors.

Weekly and monthly periodicals can be more accurate in their
information, but even they are not always dependable. Much of the
financial news published comes from agencies that are not reliable. Read
what Henry Clews says about them:

"Principally among these caterers are the financial news agencies
and the morning Wall Street news sheet, both specially devoted to
the speculative interests that centre at the Stock Exchange. The
object of these agencies is a useful one; but the public have a
right to expect that when they subscribe for information upon which
immense transactions may be undertaken, the utmost caution, scrutiny
and fidelity should be exercised in the procurement and publication
of the news. Anything that falls short of this is something worse
than bad service and bad faith with subscribers; it is dishonest and
mischievous. And yet it cannot be denied that much of the so-called
news that reaches the public through these instrumentalities must