Great post harrytrader. Perhaps one of the best chronicles of delusional buyers, among the South Sea Co. It's amazing that bubbles and delusional buyers will always be around, and resurface in another fad. After reading Extraordinary Popular Delusions... my view of the markets changed forever. Normally, it's neither the supply nor the demand, but the perception of them.
I like more and more to read history - that wasn't the case before I rather found history boring - but now it fascinates me how people behave exactly with the same denial than people in the past: "It can't be, this time it's different, we live in modern civilisation" etc. That people are cupid doesn't surprise me but that they forget their interest and above all the interest of their children for the future I have some difficulty to imagine that their cupidity can go over that.
"Those who do not understand history are doomed to repeat it." That's opne of the greatest things about history. So many of the world's greatest generals have all read Sun Tzu's Art of War. Many people couldn't understand why I recommended one of Charles Mackay's greatest pieces. Extraordinary Popular Delusions... became a "bible" of my trading faith. I read that book for the first time in 1990, and I really didn't understand it's meaning until the market whipped me. Another great quote from that booko: "Subscribers here by thousands float, and jostle one another down, Each paddling in his leaky boat, and here they fish for gold and drown. Now buried in the depths below. New mounted up to heaven again, they reel and stagger to and fro, At their wits' end. like drunken men. Meantime, secure on Garraway cliffs, A savage race, by shipwrecks fed, Lie waiting for the foundered skiffs, and strip the bodies of the dead." Framed and in my office. Be well.
whoever thought they could sell the tulip for 1,100,000.00 . that is who would buy it for 1,000,000.00 . value is nothing more than perception---there is no such thing as "intrinsic" value. surfer
If there was such a thing as true value, then nothing would ever be sold. IMO buyer and seller never agree on price, that is exactly the reason why one party is selling and the other is buying Every time I hear about the tulip madness I become more proud of being Dutch. Did we - the Dutch - invent madness, or just perfect it....