One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

William Feather (1889–1981) was an American publisher and columnist best known for short, aphoristic observations on business, money, and everyday judgment, widely circulated through newspapers and quotation collections. This remark reflects the mid‑20th‑century popular fascination with stock picking and market “savvy,” especially as more ordinary Americans participated in equities and financial commentary flourished. Feather’s style often punctures pretension with a commonsense paradox: in markets, every confident action has an equally confident counterparty. The line is typically presented as a standalone aphorism rather than tied to a specific speech or event.

Feather highlights a basic but easily forgotten fact about markets: each trade pairs two opposing judgments, and both participants can feel clever at the moment of execution. The humor points to overconfidence and the illusion of superior insight—buyers imagine they’ve found value; sellers imagine they’ve exited at the right time. His deeper implication is epistemic humility: price is a negotiated consensus under uncertainty, not a scoreboard proving one side’s intelligence. The quote also hints at why forecasting is hard and why narratives of personal brilliance in investing can be misleading, since “being right” depends on future information neither party fully possesses.