The Stock Market is People

Just want to share with you the wisdom of Bernard Baruch (1870 – 1965), a very wise speculator and several times presidential adviser.

"I doubt that anything I write will change this. To many persons Wall Street will always remain a place to bet and gamble. Still, the stock market is far more than an air-conditioned indoor race track.

Actually it could be termed the total barometer for our civilization. The price of stocks – and commodities and bonds as well – are affected by literally anything and everything that happens in our world, from new inventions and the changing value of the dollar to vagaries of the weather and the threat of war or the prospect of peace. But these happenings do not make themselves felt in Wall Street in an impersonal way, like so many jigglings on a seismograph. What registers in the stock market’s fluctuations are not the events themselves but the human reactions to these events, how millions of individual men and women feel these happenings may affect the future.

Above all else, in other words, the stock market is people. It is people trying to read the future. And it is this intensely human quality that makes the stock market so dramatic an areana in which men and women pit their conflicting judgments, their hopes and fears, strengths and weaknesses, greeds and ideals.

Of course, I did not know or even sense any of this when I first went into Wall Street to work as an office boy and runner. I made my full quota of mistakes – being ambitious and energetic, probably more than my share. One could say that my whole career in Wall Street proved one long process of education in human nature.

And as I moved into public life I was to find that what I had learned about people from my speculator days applied equally to all other human affairs. Human nature remained human nature whether it stood bent over a stock ticker or spoke from the White House, whether it sat in on the councils of war or at peace conferences, whether it was concerned with making money or trying to control atomic energy. "

Bernard Baruch, My Own Story, Buccaneer, 1957, p.84.