Excerpt from The Elements of Speculation For the sake of a clear understanding it may be well to define the meaning of the word "Speculation" as employed in this volume. There has been a widespread corruption of the term, particularly when applied to operations in securities. The popular understanding is that a speculator is one who gambles on margin, who buys what he cannot pay for, or sells what he does not own. The man who buys outright and pays for what he buys is called an investor. In both cases the terms are frequently misused. Any purchase of securities made because the stock or bond purchased is considered cheap and in hope of an advance in value and price, is a speculative purchase. It matters not whether the property so acquired is paid for in cash or a partial payment made in the form of a margin. Yet so hazy is the general opinion on this subject that the man who buys on margin and borrows the balance from his broker is called a speculator, while the man who buys outright and then hypothecates his certificates with his banker for a loan is called an investor. The process is exactly the same in both cases. The distinction is without a difference. If a purchase is made through a broker on margin, the broker must at once pay for the purchase in full, charging the unpaid balance to the customer as a loan. The actual certificates are the broker's security just as they would become a bank's security in case they are made the basis of a loan. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

The readers of Moody's Magazine are familiar with Mr. Gibson's works, "The Pitfalls of Speculation" and "The Cycles of Speculation," both of which were published by Moody's Magazine Book Department. In the works referred to Mr. Gibson points out in a general way the errors and possibilities of speculative ventures and offers suggestions as to correct methods. In this new volume he takes up in detail the principal fundamental factors governing security price movements and endeavors to show how, such factors may be examined and weighed" expeditiously and accurately. In this book Mr. Gibson discusses the following topics: The Anteriority of Security Prices, Crops, Security Prices and Crop Prospects, Money, The Currency Question, Our Foreign Trade, Bank Clearings, Charts and Stop Loss Orders, Mental Characteristics, The Future of Our Railroad and Industrial Securities, Speculation in Commodities. The author is one of the best known market writers of the country and has devoted his entire time for many years to the study of this work, in which he shows in a clear and simple manner the relative importance of all important basic factors and explains how they may be properly interpreted. The Elements of Speculation contains many comparative statistical tables not to be found in any other compilation. The book is uniform in size and binding with the "Pitfalls of Speculation" and the "Cycles of Speculation." —Moody's Magazine, Volume 15

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Philip L. Carret (1896-1998) was a famed investor and founder of The Pioneer Fund (Fidelity Mutual Trust), one of the first Mutual Funds in the United States. A former Barron’s reporter and WWI aviator, Carret launched the Mutual Trust in 1928 after managing money for his friends and family. The initial effort evolved into Pioneer Investments. He ran the fund for 55 years, during which an investment of $10,000 became $8 million. Warren Buffett said of him that he had “the best long term investment record of anyone I know” He is most famous for the long successful track record he achieved investing in Common Stocks and for being one of Warren Buffett’s role models. This book comprises a series of articles written for Barron’s and published in book form in 1930.—Print Ed.

One of BuzzFeed's 24 Best Fiction Books of 2015 "As Simon, a lonely research librarian, searches frantically for the key to a curse that might be killing the women in his family, he learns strange and fascinating secrets about their past. A tale full of magic and family mystery, The Book of Speculation will keep you up all night reading."—Isaac Fitzgerald, BuzzFeed Simon Watson, a young librarian, lives alone in a house that is slowly crumbling toward the Long Island Sound. His parents are long dead. His mother, a circus mermaid who made her living by holding her breath, drowned in the very water his house overlooks. His younger sister, Enola, ran off six years ago and now reads tarot cards for a traveling carnival. One June day, an old book arrives on Simon's doorstep, sent by an antiquarian bookseller who purchased it on speculation. Fragile and water damaged, the book is a log from the owner of a traveling carnival in the 1700s, who reports strange and magical things, including the drowning death of a circus mermaid. Since then, generations of "mermaids" in Simon's family have drowned--always on July 24, which is only weeks away. As his friend Alice looks on with alarm, Simon becomes increasingly worried about his sister. Could there be a curse on Simon's family? What does it have to do with the book, and can he get to the heart of the mystery in time to save Enola? In the tradition of Sara Gruen's Water for Elephants, Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus, and Elizabeth Kostova's The Historian, The Book of Speculation--with two-color illustrations by the author--is Erika Swyler's moving debut novel about the power of books, family, and magic.

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This book contains the proceedings from Weaponising Speculation, a two-day conference and exhibition that took place in Dublin in March 2013. Weaponising Speculation was organised by D.U.S.T. (Dublin Unit for Speculative Thought) and aimed to be an exploration of the various expressions of DIY theory operative in the elsewheres, the shafts and tunnels of the para-academy. The topics covered all come under the welcoming embrace of speculation, spanning a broad range: from art, philosophy, nature, fiction, and computation to spiders, culinary cosmology, and Oscar the Grouch. The book itself aims to be more than just a collection of essays and catalogue of artworks, but also a documentation of the event as a whole. An object that both those present at the event and those who missed it would want to own - bringing something new to both sets of readers