Speculation on the market has always been dangerous business for the uninformed. Edward Chancellor writes about the activities of nineteenth century speculator Daniel Drew who manipulated the market with great ability.
Chancellor writes that, “Male or female, rich or poor, healthy or infirm, the vast majority of speculators were necessarily outsiders, mere fodder for the great operators. It was a saying of the drover [Daniel] Drew that “anyone who plays the stock market not as an insider is like a man buying cows in the moonlight.”
(Edward Chancellor, Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation, Plume, New York, p. 167)