Shares can be a great long term investment there is the case of the Long Beach, California, couple, who received $1,000 each as a gift at their wedding in 1896. Some of it was invested in 10 shares of William Seward Burroughs' American Arithmometer Company, starting point of the Burroughs Corporation, now one of the leading manufacturers of business machines. Over the years, the couple diversified their holdings, but the essential element of their portfolio was Burroughs. At the death of the wife, the surviving partner, in 1958, the estate was valued at between $1 and $1.5 million.

Likewise, $10,000 invested in General Motors fifty years ago would now be worth about $6 million.

There is the doctor who never looked at the stock tables from one end of the year to the other, but who faithfully invested $1,000 in duPont every December 1. He bought high, he bought low, always following the dictates of the calendar alone. A more haphazard system of investment except for its regularity?would be hard to find. But because the stock was duPont, he made a fortune.

Something like this seems to be in the minds of many investors today. The New York Stock Exchange's periodic tabulations of the "Favorite Fifty" stocks of Monthly Investment Plan buyers must delight the hearts of even the most conservative investment advisors. All by themselves, people are choosing the finest grade of security to rest their future hopes on. No wildcatting here.

A glance at current trading values does not seem to bear this out. Action is at a high peak. Three-million-share days are not at all unusual. It would seem that short-term trading is the rule. Part of this, however, is due to the fact that there is a vastly increased number of shares outstanding, and part due to the fact that most trading is being done with about 12 per cent of the lot. Some 88 per cent, in effect, have been withdrawn from circulation and sit in someone's safe-deposit box, as an anchor to windward.

Backstopping this trend are the institutional investors?the insurance companies, mutual funds, personal trust and pension funds, mutual savings banks, college endowments, and non-profit foundations, all the great agglomerations of money which control about 16 per cent of all listed common-stock values. Such funds are never static. They switch their portfolios constantly. But since, as professionals, their scale of values is much like that of other professionals, they have all invested heavily in Blue Chips and do not trade capriciously in the hopes of finding something better. They are not rocking the boat, either.

What would happen if today's sunny optimism were blighted by black fears is hard to say. The vision of several dozen institutions dumping stock in a panic?and of any significant number of the individual investors following suit'is quite dismaying. The market's plunge on the news of President Eisenhower's heart attack was one indication of what can happen. Other events obviously could trigger off a similar response, or a worse one.

On the other hand, the market has also shown tremendous resilience. It has come back strongly after each upset. As long as investors retain a fundamental faith in America's economic prospects, disaster can very likely be averted.

This article is a guide to common-stock investment for newcomers to the market. It will go fairly deeply into theory and practice, and into the technical workings of the market, primarily because a grounding in fundamentals is essential to any degree of success. It cannot be stressed strongly enough that the operation of the capitalistic system, as reflected in the stock market, is a subtle and sophisticated thing.

Economists are still puzzled by the invisible forces to which it is subject.. For investors the problem is compounded by the necessity, not to explain the past or evaluate the present, but to probe the future in an effort to determine the possibility of profit. The interaction of the system and the human beings seeking to understand its pattern and dimension takes place in a market which acts and reacts with bewildering swiftness and paralyzing confusion. Only the investor who learns to take his bearings, and to reduce the array of alternatives confronting him by knowing beforehand what he is trying to achieve, will come out ahead.

For it is historically true that new investors appear after a trend has been established. Yet 48 per cent of our 12,500,000 investors have entered the market only since 1952. The vast majority have never known anything but a bull market and the happy accumulation of profit. The savage, dollar-destroying reversal, the bitter despair of a prolonged slump, the cruel retribution of overstaying a market?all these, for these people, are no more than theoretical.

Yet they are normal occurrences of the stock market, and will be again. When the break comes, it will be the inexperienced investor who will react too slowly, react in confusion, and thereby lose?and suffer?most.

This is not Old Testament prophecy. It is simply an emphatic statement of the necessity of learning the ground rules. For these apply every minute of every trading day, whether the market is behaving well or poorly.

This is a fascinating and fabulous period in which to be entering the market and acquiring your share of American business. The projections of America's growth in the years ahead are staggering. Our needs and requirements will, in all probability, be enormously in excess of anything we have been used to in the past. If business and industry respond appropriately, the holder of soundly selected common stocks should do extremely well.

When we think of Forex, the main advantage is that considerable sums can be made in a much shorter period of time and reinvested to make more money. We do not need to have money invested over a long period as we do for best results with the stock market.