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He was called The Boy Plunger. Jesse Livermore made and lost multiple fortunes, including the biggest short in history during the 1929 crash. This is the story of the man who could read every tick in the market, but never mastered himself.
“It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting.” — Jesse Livermore
What are the world's biggest investors actually saying right now? And what can we learn from the legends who came before them?
Every episode, we go source-by-source through interviews, reports, and predictions from investors like Cathie Wood, Ray Dalio, and Stanley Druckenmiller—plus deep dives into the timeless lessons from trading legends like Jesse Livermore and Paul Tudor Jones.
No speculation. Just verified quotes, specific predictions, and the strategies behind the world's greatest money minds.
This is Money Men.
This episode is going to be about Jesse Livermore. So he's the main character in Reminiscence of a Stock Operator, which is actually a fictionalized biography based on his life. And we do know that the author Edwin Lefebvre, he actually interviewed Livermore extensively, so it's probably the most accurate description we have of how he actually thought and operated. Jesse also wrote his own book called How to Trade in Stocks, which is essentially part manual, memoir, so a lot of the details of his life and strategies have come from that as well. Some people say that he was the greatest speculator of all time, and I want to start with his story, which is also a tragedy because he committed suicide at the age of just 63, and he was completely broke and destitute.
Josh Stanton:So on the one hand, he was one of the greatest traders of all time, but on the other hand, he lost everything, and there are a lot of lessons to be learned from a story like that. So he was born in 1877 in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. He said, my father was a farmer. He wanted me to work on the farm, but I didn't want to. And that's basically how it starts.
Josh Stanton:A kid who didn't want to spend his life behind a plow. So at 14, he actually runs away from home. He said, one day I told my mother I was going to leave home. I didn't want to work on the farm, and that was all there was to it. So here's what he ends up doing.
Josh Stanton:He ends up going to Boston, and he gets a job for $5 a week, which is approximately about $200 in today's money. He said, I was 14 when I got a job as a quotation board boy in a stock brokerage office in Boston. It wasn't really a brokerage in the modern sense. It was what they called essentially a bucket shop, a place where people bet on stock prices instead of actually buying and selling the stocks. He said, It was a bucket shop of course, but I didn't know that.
Josh Stanton:I only knew that the quotations were printed on a tape and that I had to write them on the board. His job was simple: take prices from the ticket tape, write them on the board, erase them, and do it all day long. And this is where he first starts to think about how the markets actually work. They were always changing, he said. There was They were always changing, he said.
Josh Stanton:That was all I had to think about for five hours a day, and they were always They were always changing, he said. That was all I had to think about for five hours a day, that they were always changing. That is how I first came to be interested in the behavior of prices. So at this point he doesn't fully understand what he's doing other than that his job is to update the board with new quotes as they come in, and because he's just generally interested in numbers he starts to spot patterns. So he begins to keep track of these patterns in a small notebook.
Josh Stanton:Every day he copies the prices down, opens, highs, lows, closes, and he starts noticing these patterns that just keep repeating themselves. Certain movements that seem to happen before big moves up or down. He doesn't actually know it yet, but he's basically discovering technical analysis decades before the phrase ever existed. Eventually, he tries to trade with another one of the boys who worked in the bucket shop, and the story went that the other boy had a tip on Burlington Railroad. And so Jesse, not trusting his tip, opens up a little notebook and notices that Burlington is in fact acting the way it should before it goes up.
Josh Stanton:And so together they place a bet. He ends up making exactly $3.12, which in today is about a $100. He said, after that first trade, I was speculating on my own hook. I was playing a system and not a favorite stock or backing opinions. All I knew was the arithmetic of it.
Josh Stanton:And I actually really love that line right there, not opinions, but the arithmetic, which is very different back in that time because a lot of people were essentially just focusing on taking tips from newspapers and that kind of stuff. And so essentially this becomes the foundation of his career. He doesn't care for tips because he's probably noticing at this point that that's how most of the customers are actually losing their money, and so instead he relies on his notebook and the repeated patterns he has written down. And that's probably why he starts winning from the very beginning. At 15 years old, he's making more money trading than he makes at his job.
Josh Stanton:And so eventually, he does what every teenager would probably do. He ends up quitting. And so he comes home one day, and I really love his story. He comes home one day, and he shows his mother a stack of cash. It's about $1,000.
Josh Stanton:He actually slaps it down on the table in front of her, which would essentially be a roughly $35,000 in today's money. And it's so much money that at first his mother doesn't believe it's real. It's more money than she's seen in her entire life. So I actually think it's really funny. She actually tells him to put it into a savings account.
Josh Stanton:He said she didn't quite believe it was real money. She used to worry and fret about it. And I love what he says next to you. He said, but I didn't think of anything except that I could keep on proving my figuring was right. That's all the fun there is, being right by using your head.
Josh Stanton:And so you can already see the mindset of Jesse starting to form here. For him, it wasn't really about the money. It was about being right through observation and logic. So from there the winds just keep coming. He actually becomes known around Boston as what they called a boy plunger.
Josh Stanton:Now plunger back then, it didn't mean what it means now. So essentially what it meant was someone who took big positions, who plunged in. He was betting in multiple bucket shops at once actually at this this point using fake names, which think is really funny because they just kept banning him for winning too much. He said, it didn't take long for the bucket shops to get sore of me for beating them. I'd walk in and plank down my margin, but they'd look at it without making a move.
Josh Stanton:They'd tell me there was nothing doing. So you have to remember at this point, these things are basically scam houses, and he's figured out a way to beat them. And I'm gonna tell you exactly how he did it. So first, he knew the prices better than the operators themselves, which I think is kind of interesting. He wasn't gambling on tips as well.
Josh Stanton:He studied the behavior of the ticket tapes. He was watching that ticket tape over and over and over again. Right? And so he noticed the tapes rhythm shifted before big moves, essentially speeding up for rallies or slowing down for drops. Also, these bucket shops ran on a delayed ticker, which meant that quotes lagged behind the real market by about ten to twenty minutes.
Josh Stanton:So what he did is he used this essentially, and he placed bets in one shot before the update hit, and he would gain a slim edge with observation and memory. So he's just like looking at his notepad, he was just noticing when patterns were showing up, and he was essentially getting in front of these bucket shops. So eventually, all but one of them actually refused to take his trades, and the one that did, they put a serious handicap on him making it almost impossible for him to win. So he actually went as far as to disguise himself with different names and addresses, but they all knew who he was and they refused his business every single time. So he knew at this point he'd outgrown the game, and that's when he decided to leave for New York and start trading for real.
Josh Stanton:And that's really where this story begins. So after cleaning out the bucket shops in Boston, he decides he's ready for the real market. He said, when I left Boston to go to New York, I had about $2,500 saved up. All I had made in the bucket shops. So $2,500 would be about $80,000 today.
Josh Stanton:So he's got a he's decently flushed at this point. And so he goes to New York to see if he can make it as a real trader. He said, I went to a New York Stock Exchange house, one of the biggest ones in the country, and opened an account. At first, he thinks it's going to be the same kind of game. He's reading the tape, taking small positions just like what he did in the bucket shops.
Josh Stanton:But then reality sets in. He says, in the bucket shops, I could get the next quotation. Here, the tape always talked ancient history to me. By the time I got the quotation, the price had already changed. So there was no delay, which meant that he had to be quicker on his feet to play the same kind of game.
Josh Stanton:In Boston, he had a built in advantage. He was faster than the house. In New York, there was no lag. Everything's in real time here and he's suddenly the slow one and he begins to lose big. He said, on my first attempt, I lost $1,100 It was my first real experience of trading in a stock brokerage office.
Josh Stanton:I was almost wiped out on the first try. It wasn't six months before I was broke. So he walked in thinking he was unbeatable and just six months later, he's completely broke. Then comes one of the most important things he ever says. What beat me was not having brains enough to stick to my own game.
Josh Stanton:That is to play the market only when I was satisfied that precedence favored my play. Now I've thought about that line a lot. It's so easy to lose discipline. And as soon as you start trading outside of what works, things start to go wrong, and that's what Jesse had experienced. He keeps going.
Josh Stanton:Whenever I read the tape by the lot of experience, I made money. When I made a plain full play, I had to lose. So again, he's saying that he went away from his strategy and probably started taking tips from other traders. And then he said this about his temperament. I never lose my temper over the stock market.
Josh Stanton:I never argue with the tape. Getting sore at the market doesn't get you anywhere. Absolutely love that. Essentially, what he has is that mindset of a professional. He's seeing the market as something that is neutral and not something that's against him.
Josh Stanton:He didn't take it personally. He didn't get angry. And then I just love this quote from the book. He says, the market does not beat them. They beat themselves.
Josh Stanton:And that's the truth every trader eventually has to learn. Later, he said, a man must believe in himself and his judgment if he expects to make a living at this game. He must not believe blindly. And after years of reflection, he summed up his philosophy with a line that I think defines who he would later become, which we're about to find out. He said, after spending many years in Wall Street and after making and losing millions of dollars, I want to tell you this.
Josh Stanton:It never was my thinking that made the big money for me. It always was my sitting. Got that? My sitting tight. So during this period, you can tell he was quite restless and wanted to trade pretty frequently.
Josh Stanton:And at the bucket shops, maybe that strategy worked, but on Wall Street, it didn't so much. And so he had to start making adjustments. And this is where he said, men who can both be right and sit tight are uncommon. I found it one of the hardest things to learn. So you can see at this point, he's starting to form his foundational principles, and this is gonna come into play later when he starts to win really big.
Josh Stanton:After going broke in New York, he doesn't give up. He said, after losing all my money, I went to St. Louis and got a job in a bucket shop. I made a little stake and came back to New York. So when he comes back to New York, he commits to being more conservative this time around, so more businesslike.
Josh Stanton:He's not just watching the tape anymore, he starts to study himself. And I love what he says here. He says, after that first wipeout, I began to see where I had been wrong. I realized that the tape told the truth, but that I had not learned to listen to it properly. That line I think is really important.
Josh Stanton:The tape told the truth, but I hadn't learned to listen. And that's essentially the psychological turning point for him at this stage. And he's starting to look at the market more broadly, what he calls general conditions. He says, a man must study general conditions to seize them so that he may anticipate probabilities. Notice that word right there, probabilities.
Josh Stanton:He's moving from trying to be right to trying to be prepared. So he's making the shift from prediction to probability. He adds, if after I study the general market, I reach the conclusion that stocks in general are not going up. It is not worthwhile to buy anything. I will not buy until I am sure that the market itself is right.
Josh Stanton:And I think that's exactly how the best traders today think. You saw a struck a millen d'alio. All them say some version of this. So by nineteen o six, he's back in New York and trading again. This is the year of the San Francisco earthquake.
Josh Stanton:It's a national disaster, and it's caused a cascade of financial stress. He said, in nineteen o six, after the San Francisco earthquake, I went short of the market and made a small fortune. But what's fascinating is how he made that trade. He wasn't guessing at this point. He was reading conditions.
Josh Stanton:When the money market got tight, I began to sell stocks short again. It was not a guess. I could feel that the market was weak. I'll say that again. He said, I could feel that the market was weak.
Josh Stanton:And that line gets quoted a lot, and it's actually misunderstood even more. He's not talking about intuition in the mystical sense. He's talking about pattern recognition here. So essentially seeing the same setup repeat and knowing how it usually ends. Then comes the panic of nineteen o seven, one of the worst financial crisis in US history.
Josh Stanton:The Knickerbock trust fails, credit disappears, and panic starts to spread. And Livermore is positioned perfectly for it. He said, when the panic came, I was short 100,000 shares in the right stocks. It was the easiest money I ever made. I wasn't guessing.
Josh Stanton:The market told me what to do. That's such a great quote right there. I wasn't guessing. The market told me what to do. And he continues, it was not my plan to make money out of the distress of others, but I had followed my system and the system was right.
Josh Stanton:He's making millions while the market is collapsing, but it's not luck and it's not opportunism. It's discipline. He's doing exactly what his rules told him to do. And then there's this incredible moment where he gets the timing perfect because he notices JPMorgan, like as in the JPMorgan and other bankers, they start to push for support. And as soon as that happens, he knows for certain that he needs to get out of his short positions and he starts to buy again.
Josh Stanton:And then he says this, which might be one of those quoted lines in all of reminiscence of a stock operator. He says, there is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again. What he's telling us there is that markets are just a reflection of human nature, and human nature never changes, keeps repeating itself over and over again.
Josh Stanton:And he adds, the game does not change and neither does human nature, and that's really the heart of what he's trying to get at here. Every chart, every trade, every boom, every bust, they're all expressions of the same emotional cycle. By the end of nineteen o seven, he's made an absolute fortune, but even in victory, he's still reflective. He said, it was my sitting tight that made the money for me in the panic in nineteen o seven, and I knew it. But it is one thing to know it and another to keep knowing it.
Josh Stanton:I think that last sentence, it is one thing to know it and another to keep knowing it, might be one of those honest lines ever written about trading. He knows the lesson. He just doesn't know if he'll be able to hold on to it. So at this point, he's really starting to form some incredible principles. He's proven that essentially the market always tells the truth.
Josh Stanton:Patience beats prediction. Human nature never changes. And the hardest thing is not learning a rule, it's remembering it. And we can kind of think of Warren Buffett's famous saying here. He says, rule number one, never lose money.
Josh Stanton:Rule number two, never forget rule number one. So after nineteen o seven, Jesse Livermore is really rich, and he's only 30 years old. He's gone from a kid watching a ticket tape in a bucket shop to one of the most talked about traders on Wall Street. He said, after the panic of nineteen o seven, I was worth over $3,000,000. I had made it all in the stock market.
Josh Stanton:So $3,000,000 in nineteen o seven, which is that's close to about $100,000,000 today. And so as you can imagine, he's in his early thirties. He's probably living like a king at this stage, and everyone on Wall Street knows his name. But even in the middle of success, he's uneasy. He said, the speculators' deadly enemies are ignorance, greed, fear, and hope.
Josh Stanton:And that's such a simple list, but that's the whole game if you really think about it. Ignorance, greed, fear, and hope. And I think every trader today still fights those four things every time they click buy or sell. He continues. The average man doesn't wish to be told that it is a bull or bear market.
Josh Stanton:What he desires is to be told specifically which particular stock to buy or sell. And I absolutely love what he's saying here. Essentially, what he's saying is that most people, what they don't actually want to think. They just want a tip. They want someone else thinking for them, which is probably why commentators end up making so much money even though most of the time you're probably better off fading their advice rather than actually taking it.
Josh Stanton:And that's exactly how Livermore gets into trouble again because he starts listening to other people. Even though he's made a fortune, he keeps trading. He can't stop even though he should probably slow down and take less risk. This is where he said, the desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses in Wall Street even among the professionals. And what he's doing is actually talking about himself here.
Josh Stanton:He's made millions by sitting tight, and now he starts losing it because he's trading too much, and it just keeps on spiraling. He said, it is inseparable for human nature to hope and to fear. In speculation, when the market goes against you, you hope that every day will be your last day, and you lose more than you should if you don't get out. Essentially, hope is the killer. He's seen it in others, and now he's seeing it in in himself.
Josh Stanton:Hope that is. Here's what he says. He says, and when the market goes your way, you become fearful that the next day will take away your profit, and you get out too soon. And that's one of those universal truths you could hang in front of you, cutting your winner short and letting your losers run all because of emotion. And that's what I really love about Paul Tudor Jones' style who admits that he chooses to play on defense most of the time.
Josh Stanton:So if you don't like a trade, he says, you should probably get out and remember that you can always get in again if you want. Livermore summarizes the problem perfectly. He says, fear keeps you from making as much money as you ought to. Hope keeps you from making any at all. So by 1915, his fortune is almost completely gone.
Josh Stanton:He said, I had lost nearly everything. My creditors were pressing me. I had to file a petition in bankruptcy. This isn't because his system stopped working. It's because he stopped working it.
Josh Stanton:He broke his own rules. He started speculating in commodities, trading with without signals, and overleveraging himself. He said, I was playing a system, but it was not the old Livermore system. It was a wish system. So then he becomes super honest with himself here.
Josh Stanton:He calls it a wish system. Right? And every trader at some point has traded a wish system for sure. A setup built on hope instead of actual logic. But, again, he doesn't stay down for long.
Josh Stanton:He goes back to his principles, and he starts studying his own mistakes all over again. He said the only thing to do when a man is wrong is to be right by ceasing to be wrong. And that's just a brilliant line right there. When you're wrong, just stop being wrong. And slowly, he starts to recover.
Josh Stanton:He's humbled now, but not defeated and learned something new. He said, the big money was not in the individual fluctuations, but in the made movements. That is not in reading the tape, but in sizing up the entire market and its trend. So what he's doing here is he's finally learning to zoom out. He's realizing that trading is less about predicting ticks and more about understanding tides.
Josh Stanton:And then there's this beautiful passage that sums up how he thought about the market after decades of wins and losses. He said, the market does not beat the man who tries to reason it out. It is the man who changes his mind after the market has changed that fails. That And right there, that's conviction. It's not stubbornness.
Josh Stanton:He's not trying to be stubborn. It's conviction earned through pattern recognition. And right after saying that, he adds this sobering truth. He says, speculation is a hard and trying business, and a speculator must be on the job all the time, or he'll soon have no job to be on. And so by the time he's back on his feet, World War one is ending.
Josh Stanton:He's richer again, not nineteen o seven rich, but comfortable at this stage. But if you've read ahead, you already know the pattern. Livermore's greatest strength and his greatest weakness are the same thing. It's obsession. He's definitely mastered the market at this point, but he hasn't fully mastered himself yet, which we're about to learn.
Josh Stanton:So by the early 1920s, Jesse Livermore is back. He's back in the game. He's made and lost multiple fortunes by this point, but now he's entering his prime. He's trading much bigger, smarter, and slower as well. He said, I never buy stocks cheap.
Josh Stanton:I never sell stocks cheap. What he's saying is that he doesn't care about price. He cares about timing. Cheap stocks can get cheaper and expensive ones can get more expensive. He said prices like everything else move along the line of least resistance.
Josh Stanton:They will do whatever comes easiest. And that's such a useful idea to really keep in mind. The line of least resistance. It's how he explains trends. He's not fighting the market anymore.
Josh Stanton:He's flowing with it. He adds, a prudent speculator never argues with a tape. Markets are never wrong. Opinions often are. He's not saying you can't have opinions.
Josh Stanton:He's just saying that your opinions don't matter when the market disagrees. So now that he's more established at this point, he starts thinking about capital very differently. He's not trying to catch every move. He's trying to compound intelligently. He said, don't take action with a trade until the market itself confirms your opinion.
Josh Stanton:Being a little late in a trade is insurance that your opinion is correct. And that's such a fantastic piece of advice right there. He's saying, let the market prove you right before you risk real money. Patience is confirmation. And I think this is one of the biggest differences between amateur and professional traders is not having the patience to wait until a trend is confirmed before diving in.
Josh Stanton:He goes on and adds, one of the most helpful things that anybody can learn is to give up trying to catch the last eighth or the first. These two are the most expensive eighths in the world. And I so think what he's trying to say here is that he's probably lost a lot of money trying to time the tops and the bottoms. And so now he's starting to be a lot more conservative with his trades by waiting for a confirmation before he goes in. And on top of that, he's learning to control something even more difficult, which is himself.
Josh Stanton:He said, it is what people do in the stock market that counts, not what they say they are going to do. And so that one actually hit me really hard because I have a bit of a bad habit of hesitating too much and concerning myself with wanting to be right versus just accepting the probabilities. He keeps going. The average man doesn't wish to think of the market as a game of skill. He regards it as a game of chance.
Josh Stanton:And that's such a profound observation. Even after decades of seeing the same patterns repeat themselves, most people still think trading is only about luck. Livermore knew better, but he also knew how easy it was to forget that truth in a bull market. So by the mid nineteen twenties, he's become an absolute legend in New York. He owns a 5th Avenue mansion.
Josh Stanton:It's a private yacht. He has a bunch of custom cars, and people also writing about him in newspapers. He's one of the first traders ever to become essentially a celebrity, and he's actually aware of the danger of that. And so at this point we're in the bull market of the roaring twenties, but he can start to feel something building. Before that though he said, when I study a market, I look for a line of least resistance.
Josh Stanton:When everything points up, I go long. When everything points down, I go short. And now everything is pointing up. The roaring twenties are in full swing at this point. Stocks are doubling and tripling.
Josh Stanton:Everyone from bankers to barbers is trading on margin. Livermore's seen this movie before. He knows exactly how it ends. He said, people who look for easy money invariably pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this earth. And that's to set up for what's coming next, the nineteen twenty nine crash, the greatest trade of his life.
Josh Stanton:It's 1929 now, and his capital base is enormous. His confidence has been restored. He's operating completely independently. He's got no partners, no syndicates, no clients. The market meanwhile is absolutely euphoric as you can imagine.
Josh Stanton:Credit is easy. Leverage is everywhere, and the idea that stocks can fall has absolutely vanished. He's watching it all unfold on the ticker. He said, the speculators chief enemies are always boring from within. It is inseparable for human nature to hope and to fear, and that's the foundation of every bubble, hope and fear alternating in that perfect rhythm.
Josh Stanton:He's seeing something familiar now. Prices aren't rising because of earnings or innovation. They're rising because people are afraid of missing out. And as the market keeps climbing, he starts building his short positions quietly. He's not trying to call a top.
Josh Stanton:He's just waiting for confirmation. He said, I don't try to pick tops or bottoms. I wait for the market to show its hand. And that's Livermore's version of trade what you see, not what you think. And for the first time in years, he can feel panic starting to creep in.
Josh Stanton:He said, I went short because the tape showed me the public was drunk on margin, same as nineteen o seven. So when the crash hits, which is Black Thursday, October 24, the market opens down and never recovers. Within days, stocks lose nearly half their value. But by that time, he had slowly been building a strong short position. He said, it was the easiest money I ever made.
Josh Stanton:I wasn't guessing. The market told me what to do. Black Thursday was a tape screaming, and panic was my signal to hold short. Newspapers called him the man who sold America short. Now, obviously, his ego must have kicked in at this point, but it seemed as though he was able to control his emotions quite well, saying, I never allow myself to get excited or enthusiastic about any position I may have.
Josh Stanton:It is the surest way to defeat. And that's the mentality that formed over time with all the ups and downs, absolute detachment. He's made the greatest short trade in history and feels nothing but confirmation that his rules work. And so coming back to the original motivation for when he made his first thousand dollars when he said to his mother, that's all the fun there is. Being right by using your head.
Josh Stanton:But as we're about to hear, success comes with a price. The public ends up hating him for profiting from a collapse that wiped out millions of lives and savings. He said, the public blames me for what they did themselves. I did not cause the market to go down. I only read the signal that it was going to do so.
Josh Stanton:So after the crash, his wealth is almost beyond comprehension, but he's also really exhausted, and the market has given him everything and taken almost as much in return. He reflects upon this where he says, after forty years of studying and training, I've learned that it is not good to try to make all the money in the world. And that's the voice of a man who finally understands the cost of his obsession. So that's where we find him at the end of 1929, richer than ever, but still restless. So at this point, he's made what was probably the single greatest trading history, and for a moment, he's completely untouchable.
Josh Stanton:But markets have a way of humbling even the best players. And by 1932, the same discipline that made him rich starts to slip again. He begins buying too early, trying to catch a recovery after the crash. He's still trading the last war, and the same pattern as to find his life starts repeating itself. He said, there is no training classroom or otherwise that can prepare a man for the emotional hazards of the market.
Josh Stanton:And that's what's happening to him again now. He's exhausted, not physically, but maybe mentally at this point. He's been living inside the market for four decades, and the emotional toll is finally catching up to him. He also said, the only thing that endures in speculation is the continuous change in conditions. The trader must adjust himself accordingly.
Josh Stanton:But by this time, he isn't adjusting. The market's evolved. New SEC rules are coming, tighter spreads. There's a slower tape as well. His old instincts clash with the new game, and he keeps forcing the same movements, but it doesn't work.
Josh Stanton:He admitted, there's nothing like losing all you have in the world for teaching you what not to do, and yet he still made the same mistakes, which I think is actually kinda crazy. Through the early nineteen thirties, he keeps trading in and out of the market, but the results get worse. He files for bankruptcy again in 1934. By 1940, after losing much of his $100,000,000, which is about $1,900,000,000 in today's money, by the way, his debts exceeded $2,500,000 against $84,000 in assets. So at this point, he actually tries to write and teach instead, and he published how to trade in stocks that same year.
Josh Stanton:It's part memoir, as I said before, part instruction manual, and also part confession as well, where he writes, the successful trader has to fight these two deep seated instincts. He has to reverse what you might call his natural impulses. Instead of hoping, must fear. Instead of fearing, he must hope. He's describing exactly what he can no longer do himself.
Josh Stanton:And as the decades were on, the pressure builds. His third marriage is falling apart. His health is declining. He's probably drinking more at this point, and the market, the one thing that gave his life meaning, keeps punishing him. By late nineteen forty, he's 63 years old, and on 11/28/1940, Jessa Livermore walked in the cloakroom of the Sherry Netherland Hotel in New York.
Josh Stanton:He wrote a note to his wife that read, my dear Nina, things have been bad for me. I am tired of fighting. I cannot carry on this way any longer. This is the only way out. I am unworthy of your love.
Josh Stanton:I am sorry, but this is the end of the road. Love, Jesse. Moments later, he shoots himself. That's one of the most tragic endings in financial history, a man who could read every tick in the market but couldn't read the limits of his own mind. He once said, the game taught me the game, and it broke me.
Josh Stanton:And that's exactly what happened. He mastered the market, but he never mastered himself. So when Jesse Livermore died in 1940, the market opened the very next morning right on schedule. The ticket kept printing, stocks kept moving because that's what markets do, right? They outlive everyone.
Josh Stanton:And maybe that's the most sobering truth of all, is that you can beat the market for a while, you can even master it, but the market doesn't remember you, only the lessons you leave behind. He said, the game of speculation is the most uniformly fascinating game in the world, but it is not a game for the stupid, the mentally lazy, or the get rich quick adventurer. That line is still true a century later, and his lessons of discipline, patience, attachment, or what every trader eventually discovers the hard way. Because what Livermore was really studying all along wasn't price. It was human nature, and human nature never changes.
Josh Stanton:And that's the story of Jesse Livermore, one of the world's greatest speculators. If you got something out of this episode, please share it with someone who needs to hear it. Also, you can get in touch with me on x at Traders Show, and I'll be back soon with another story. Until then, keep studying, keep evolving, protect your money, and stay in the game.