Jesse Livermore: World's Greatest Stock Trader

I Enjoyed Livermore's Lessons/Strategies explained in this book.I only read the clearly financial trading strategy sections, namely the approximately 50 pages in: Chapter 7 "Market Theory", and Chapter 11 "When To Hold & When To Fold".I found this material to be very helpful and well explained.By contrast, I have read Livermore's book: How To Trade Stocks, but I did not like that very much even though it came directly from Livermore himself (albeit only months before he committed suicide).

If you have ever read the Reminiscences of a stock operator by Edwin Lefevre and liked it then this book is a must read. It is very hard to put down, it reads like a novel, stock trading manual, Greek tragedy, and wisdom teachings all in one. I had my doubts, but after reading this book I believe that Jesse Livermore was the greatest stock trader the world has ever seen. At the age of fourteen he walked into a "bucket shop" and got a job posting stock prices. The next year in 1892 at fifteen he makes his first successful stock trade. He was a millionaire in his early 20's and by 1907, J.P. Morgan had to personally ask him to stop selling stocks short before he did serious damage to the stock market during a crash. His greatest achievement of all was walking away from the great crash of '29 with $100 million in profit from selling stocks short when everyone else was going long. The sad part of this book was how he lost everything several times and was bankrupt, the final one happening late in his life. He had a problem with beautiful women which lead to several divorces and ruin. He committed suicide in 1940 and his son Jesse Jr. also committed suicide 35 years later.His story was really an eye opener to the pitfalls of being wealthy and lacking self control in your personal life and child rearing. This book is packed with wisdom and stock trading tactics of the master himself. Get out a highlighter and prepare to mark key learning's as you go because there are many. Here are some:Cut your losses quickly.Be sure to confirm your judgement before you take your full position.Let your profits ride if there is no good reason to close the position.The action is with the leading stocks, which change with every new market.Keep the number of stocks you follow limited in order to focus.New all time highs are to be bought on breakouts.Cheap stocks often appear to be bargains after a large drop.They often continue to fall, most have little potential to rise in price. Leave them alone.Use pivotal points to identify changes in trend and confirmations in trends.DON'T FIGHT THE TAPE!This is my #1 recommendations for stock trading books.Also read all of Dr. Alexander Elder's books for basics in money management and technical analysis.

While I'm not finished reading it, yet, I find the book fascinating. The stock trading techniques described in the book are now pretty much common knowledge, yet to trade them, in a disciplined manner is just as hard as ever.Jesse's life, while enviable at times, was quite sad and bizarre at times, due to his first two wives' issues. Still, he kept on until, well, I haven't gotten that far, yet, but I believe a sense of pointlessness must have taken over his disposition, and he acted on this. Along the way, he lived the life of a major celebrity, while remaining very private and yet brilliant in his ability to foresee market trends.I'd definitely recommend this book.

I love it , Learn about many things , I recommend this book to every young man and woman, they can learn about important things in life, and work, and human behavior, this book is very important in classroom, middle schoolers and high schoolers,

Richard Smitten has here used interviews with family members, friends and a number of ancillary sources to augment and complete the now famous Remiscences of a Stock Operator by Edwin Lefevre. That book offers the musings of famous stock speculator Jesse Livermore, in the guise of the pseudonymous Lawrence Livingston, from his earliest days as a board boy marking prices on a chalk board in a brokerage house (before computers, of course!) to his ascendancy as a skilled, respected and highly successful market player. But Remiscences ends before Livermore's great killing in the Crash of '29, when he cleared a hundred million dollars on his short trades while almost everyone else was going broke, and his subsequent decline in the '30s. Livermore, who killed himself in 1940, had apparently lost the taste for the game and, with it, the trader's sixth sense that he'd honed for years up to that point.Smitten's book aims to fill in the gaps and take the tale through to the end and, in part, it succeeds. We get many of the same stories found in Reminiscences though sometimes with less detail. We also get other stories, not previously told, and learn about Livermore's private life including his love of living well, his three wives and two sons by his second wife. Livermore, Smitten tells us, was a very introverted, emotionally repressed individual who did not relate well to others and loved to "play a lone hand." This took its toll on him after his great coup in 1929 and with the dissolution of his second marriage, led to his loss of market skills and self-control.The book adds interesting information to what Livermore himself told us in Reminscences but it does so sporadically and with little real insight into the man, who never quite comes into focus despite all the added anecdotes. The recreated dialogue is often stilted and artificial sounding and the book seems to peter out along with Livermore's life after his market triumphs (and, not infrequently, his surprising defeats) in the earlier years. The final chapter, which is really more about those Livermore left behind after his suicide than about the great man himself, reads like something of an anti-climax with no great new insights to be had. And the chapter on Livermore's trading rules is oddly repetitve, as though Smitten thought he needed to say the same thing, over and over again, to drive the rules into his readers' heads.In the end, Livermore was something of an artifact of his times, a great trader and speculator in a more free-wheeling era. Many of his insights, new at the time, are common practice today and so unsurprising. Still, the key is being able to use them, as Livermore did, rather than just knowing them by rote. Livermore remains an enigma, despite Smitten's effort. My guess is that he still awaits a definitive biography. Until then, though, Smitten's book is useful for those who want to learn a bit more about the "Boy Plunger" who set Wall Street on its ears back in the days before the Great Crash and the Depression which followed it.SWM

This is a must read even for non traders . Many insightful lessons

very detailed and well written

Excellent reading. The book provides an insight into life and psychology of one of the greatest traders in this world

Bonne surprise que cet ouvrage écrit il y a une dizaine d'année et qui relate de façon biographique la vie de Jesse Livermore, grandeur et décadence d'un génie de la finance. Un must read pour tout ceux qui veulent savoir comment suivre les tendances et couper rapidement ses pertes.

One of the best books l've read about the Greatest Stock Operator!