A timeless classic! Buy it.
The book was first published in 1923, just years before the great depression of 1929. The book is ancient, but it yet remains most relevant today if you want to understand how the stock market functions. It is a fictionalized biography of probably the most famous speculator of the early 1900’s. The book is adapted from a series of articles written by Edwin Lefevre. The author takes you inside the mind of Jesse Livermore from when he starts out as a kid and earns a reputation of being a “boy plunger” in the bucket shops of Chicago and New York to being a full-fledged serious minded professional stock operator. The book describes his journey, experiences and many anecdotes which have been preached and quoted in many other trading books. If you are considering a career as a trader or investor, you should pick this up right away! If read properly, it can educate you ground up of how things function in the financial markets. A few brilliant quotes from the book are:
1. “Experience has proved to me that real money made in speculating has been in commitments in a stock or commodity showing a profit right from the start.”
2. “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. Got that? My sitting tight!”
3. “There is only one side to the stock market, and it is not the bull side or the bear side, but the right side”
4. “It is foolhardy to make a second trade, if your first trade shows you a loss. Never average losses. Let this thought be written indelibly upon your mind.”
There are so many takeaways from this, that they cannot be summarized here. This book is a reference material of trading rules and human behavior.