Code of Honour

• A rare, ruinous blow you survive by chipping in.
• Every fund has a bottom. One Cockran can eat the whole thing.
• A fund run on orders lives as long as the man giving them. A fund run on rules outlives everyone.
• Money handed over to the common cause with no accounts stops being yours the moment you hand it over.
• A fund the boss dips into whenever he likes is his wallet.
• Share the harvest equally, and the strong stop ploughing.
• Common money works when the rules are written by those who pay in.
• If you don’t know who’s the house at this table, it isn’t you.
• Three cents on the dollar, on millions of bets, is a palace in the desert.
• Six misses tell you nothing about the seventh shot.
• Insurance against arrest, issued by the people being arrested, vanishes on the day of the arrest.
• In calm times banks fall one at a time; in a panic, together.
• A reserve built on your own experience only saves you from what you’ve already seen.
• A high rate speaks of mistrust more often than of greed.
• Every paper you show the bank is a discount on your rate.
• The loan shark doesn’t sell money. He sells the fact that you have no choice.
• An instalment plan is a loan that keeps quiet about the interest.
• Turn a discount for paying up front into an annual rate, and ask who gives the money back if the seller doesn’t live till December.
• A small debt costs you credit, a big one your life. Courts were invented to make it otherwise.
• Can’t pay? Come in person, and before the date.
• Plus a half, minus a half, comes to minus a quarter.
• Divide seventy-two by the rate and you get the years to doubling. For debts too.
• Trust the money you can count, not the millions your friends talk about.
• A price tells you more about the neighbours than about the goods.
• A loss weighs about twice as much as a find. That’s why people chase their losses.
• A pyramid’s first payment is its advertising.
• The wheel owes nobody anything.
• Different names don’t make different risks.
• Don’t keep your savings in the same basket as your job.
• Nobody promised a risk premium. If it comes, it comes to the man who held on, not the man who bought.
• A small market can be bought over lunch. A big one costs more and is harder to buy. Harder, not impossible.
• Don’t pay two per cent for somebody else’s luck.