Jesse Lauriston Livermore (1877–1940) was a legendary American investor and stock spectator. His evolution from an office boy to Wall Street “boy wonder,” his trading lessons, his financial triumphs and failures, and personal disasters make one fascinating Wall Street story.
Born into a family of farmers, Livermore was a self-made billionaire and traded his own money (unlike modern investment banks and hedge funds that trade other people’s money.) He led a life of genius and excess, surrounded by mistresses, scandals, riches, and economic failures.
Livermore became famous for making and then losing a multimillion-dollar fortune and for short-selling during the 1907 and 1929 stock market crashes. For reasons unknown, he lost the vast fortune he had made in the crash of 1929, probably from prematurely turning bullish before the markets finally bottomed in the summer of 1932. His career and life ended with his suicide in the coatroom of the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York City.
Through writer and journalist Edwin Lefèvre’s popular book Reminiscences of a Stock Operator and others’ biographies, Livermore’s wisdom and mistakes have endured with generations of Wall Street traders and investors.
More: Wikipedia • READ: Works by Jesse Lauriston Livermore
Never buy at the bottom, and always sell too soon.
—Jesse Lauriston Livermore
Topics: Wealth
My main life lesson from investing: self-interest is the most powerful force on earth, and can get people to embrace and defend almost anything.
—Jesse Lauriston Livermore
The average man doesn’t wish to be told that it is a bull or a bear market. What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. He wants to get something for nothing. He doesn’t even wish to have to think.
—Jesse Lauriston Livermore
The big money is not in the buying or the selling, but in the sitting.
—Jesse Lauriston Livermore
There is only one side of the market, and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side.
—Jesse Lauriston Livermore
Wall Street never changes, the pockets change, the suckers change, the stocks change, but Wall Street never changes, because human nature never changes.
—Jesse Lauriston Livermore
After spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars I want to tell you this: It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting.
—Jesse Lauriston Livermore
Topics: Money
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