Success Quote by Daniel Drew

Wall Street, Drew implies, is less a marketplace than a dimly lit cattle yard where the animals are deliberately hard to see. The line works because it doesn’t argue with statistics or morality; it sneers with a farmhand’s practicality. Buying cows in the moonlight is not romantic, it’s reckless: you can’t check the teeth, the gait, the true weight. Someone else, standing closer with a lantern, is going to sell you a lemon and keep walking.

Drew’s intent is double-edged. On the surface he’s warning amateurs that information is the real currency, and that trading without it is closer to gambling than investing. Underneath, it’s a confession disguised as folk wisdom: insiders aren’t merely advantaged, they’re playing a different game. The market’s “fairness” becomes a sentimental story told to the people providing liquidity.

Context matters because Drew wasn’t a disinterested commentator; he was a 19th-century railroad speculator notorious for manipulation and for helping popularize “watered stock” (inflating a company’s share count like watering down milk). In that world of thin regulation, telegraphed rumors, and operator cliques, the moonlight wasn’t metaphorical. Quotes and news traveled unevenly, and a handful of men could engineer squeezes, panics, and headline reality itself.

The cynicism lands today because it captures a perennial truth about finance: the closer you are to the source of information and power, the more the market looks like price discovery; the farther you are, the more it looks like trying to judge a cow by silhouette.