Time & Perspective Quote by Bernard Baruch

Baruch strips the romance out of market genius and replaces it with something colder: arithmetic plus self-control. The provocation is that “a good average” can be as low as 50 percent, and a fortune can be built on 30 to 40 percent. He’s puncturing the public fantasy that winners are omniscient. In his telling, the edge isn’t clairvoyance; it’s discipline.

The line works because it relocates virtue. In most moral economies, being wrong is failure. Baruch treats being wrong as the default condition of speculation, then makes the real sin something else entirely: lingering. “Cut his losses quickly” is where the quote tightens its grip. It’s not advice about picking better stocks; it’s a diagnosis of human weakness. We don’t go broke because we’re wrong, he implies. We go broke because we can’t admit it fast enough, and we keep paying tuition to our pride.

Context matters. Baruch made his name in the early 20th century’s boom-and-bust machine, when fortunes were minted amid thin regulation, manic crowds, and sudden panics. In that era, surviving was a strategy, not a platitude. His rule anticipates modern risk management: asymmetry is everything. If losses are capped and gains are allowed to run, the math can forgive mediocrity. It’s a capitalist koan with sharp elbows: accept fallibility, weaponize restraint, and let the market reward the rare moment you’re right.