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Just by following a tariff debate in Congress, Baruch made his first sizable coup of $60,000 in a sugar stock. With it he bought a seat on the New York Stock Exchange for $19,000, and married a reserved Episcopal girl named Annie Griffen, who had waited eight years for Baruch to name the day despite her father's unyielding opposition to the match. The market operation that gave Baruch a head start on his first million was inadvertently affected by the holiest day in his own faith, Yom Kippur, on which, as on other holy days, no business is to be transacted.
Convinced that copper was in oversupply in September of 1901, Baruch was busily selling Amalgamated Copper short when his mother called to remind him that the next market day was Yom Kippur. With some trepidation, Baruch decided to observe it. That morning the stock sagged below 100 but by noon rallied to 97. Had Baruch been on the trading floor, he would have closed out his short position and taken the small profit. By the market's close, Amalgamated Copper slumped again to 931. Emboldened by the events of the holy day, Baruch maintained his short position for months till the stock dropped to 60, cleared a profit of around $700,000.
After $3,200,000, What "Good"? At 32, Baruch had amassed $100,000 for every year of his life, and his father jolted his vanity by asking what "good" he intended doing with his millions. For the time being, Baruch was content merely to enjoy the colorful company his money helped him keep, including John W. ("Bet a Million") Gates and Diamond Jim Brady. Seeking an oasis of sanity more like the pastoral simplicity of his childhood, Baruch bought Hobcaw Barony, a historic, 17,000-acre parcel of land in his native South Carolina just north of Charleston. Hobcaw was nature's Xanadu, a game hunter's paradise especially famed for its massed armadas of ducks. Toward the end of his book, getting ahead of his story, Bernard Baruch tells with dramatic relish and glowing pride of F.D.R.'s month-long recuperative retreat at Hobcaw in the spring of 1944.
From his years as a stock-market speculator, Baruch feels that he gleaned something more valuable than gold, a kind of golden mean of inspired common sense: "Whatever men attempt, they seem driven to try to overdo. When hopes are soaring, I always repeat to myself, 'Two and two still make four, and no one has ever invented a way of getting something for nothing.' When the outlook is steeped in pessimism I remind myself, 'Two and two still make four, and you can't keep mankind down for long.' "