Customer Reviews

Jesse Livermore: World's Greatest Stock Trader

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If you are a fan of Jesse Livermore and could only read one book on his trading and life, this would be the book to read. Many people tout "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator", but that book actually never details Livermore's trading system. Also, many individuals erroneously claim that "Reminiscences" detailed how J.P. Morgan personally asked Livermore to stop shorting the market during the 1929 crash, when he allegedly walked away with 100 million dollars. Since "Reminiscences" was published in 1923, this would be a neat trick. Actually, Morgan asked Livermore to stop shorting the 1907 crash, to avoid a banking crisis.

Smitten has had a lifelong interest in Livermore, and personally interviewed family members, including son Paul and late son Jesse Jr.'s wife, and has studied all of the available articles and literature on Livermore. Consequently, this book contains many details unavailable from any other published work on Livermore, including more details on his trading system and personal life.

This book also dispels the common myth that Livermore committed suicide after going broke for the last time. In actuality, when he died he had an irrevocable trust worth $1 million, and his wife reputedly removed about $3 million in cash and $1 million in jewelry from their apartment hours after he died. Livermore's trading skills would have always allowed him to trade himself back to significant wealth. It was his lifelong battle with clinical depression that was most likely the reason behind his suicide, not his trading results.

This book's greatest significance is the detailing of his trading system and rules, which if followed today would be just as successful, indicating that as Livermore stated, nothing really ever changes in the market except the participants. In regard to Livermore's many busts as a trader, his only significant flaw as a trader was his complete lack of caution when he saw an opportunity, and consequently went "all in". When he was right, he made millions, and when he was wrong, he lost millions. This tendency was exacerbated by the illiquidity and delayed quotations/information/executions of the day in which he traded.

I have read "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" three times now. The more I read it, the more I get out of it.

My main problem with this book is that 3/4 of the content regurgitates the events of "Reminiscences" almost verbatim. The writers approach however is to retell this story through reconstructing dialogue between Jessie (the protagonist) and all the various characters met in Reminiscences. I found this approach extremely irritating - especially since I was familiar enough with the original Reminiscences text to detect where the author had "made up" segments of the conversation using "artistic license to capture the flavor of the original conversations" (authors own admission).

The other 1/4 deals with Jessies private life, which although I found interesting, was plagued by the same "conversation reconstruction" style.

If you have already read reminiscences, and are truly hungry to learn more about Jessies private life and selected exploits after 1923 - then buy this book. If you have not read reminiscences, read it instead - you will learn far more out of the original source.

I think this is a very good book and I cannot understand the negative reviews that have been posted here. I also have "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" which I read first, and I don't find repetition here. Although I found Remin. to be a good book as well, I think I prefer this one - being closer to the truth, and full of investment advice worth its weight in gold, where Remin. tended to hide the advice amongst the fictionalised story. I did not find it poorly written. I found it very entertaining, interesting and educational. I won't go on and on about the good things in this book - if you are involved in the markets and can't afford to take a gamble at buying it and taking a look, and throwing it in the bin if you decide for youself it is no good - if you are struggling to justify the $$$ to be able to do that, then just give up now. I just wanted to post this review to counter the few negative reviews here, so that the few who might be turned away by them instead might reconsider. It is good, it has valuable info. in it, and it is entertaining and educational. Give it a go.

While Livermore started out with nothing and died more or less bankrupt, his career in-between was genuinely meteoric. The man could turn a few thousand into a million within months, then lose it all in a couple of hours. Shows how much you can succeed (and fail) if you really put your mind to it.

This book is a worthy companion to Edwin Lefevre's barely-fictional biographical novel REMINISCENCES OF A STOCK OPERATOR. The first 180 pages or so of this one closely mirror the story in REMINISCENCES, giving real-life names to people and places, and disgorging more details on Livermore's non-trading life. It goes on from there to discuss his staggering 100-million dollar win during the Great Crash of 1929 (when so many other investors and traders opted for suicide to curtail their losses) and the steady, tragic disintegration of his family life and trading instincts that followed thereafter.

Smitten has produced an entertaining, briskly-moving account of the great trader's life that doesn't require any prior knowledge of the stock market or investing ("speculating" is a better word, as Livermore would put it). Also included are a few chapters on Livermore's trading theories culled from his 1940 book HOW TO TRADE IN STOCKS.

After reading Reminiscences of a Stock Operator I was eager to learn more about Jesse Livermore's life. This book was a big disappointment. Don't be fooled by the relatively positive reviews. This book is poorly written. The factual information of Livermore's life was interesting but you'll have to wade through a lot to get at it. The recreated conversations and artistic details are particularly annoying.

I highly recommend Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. That one was hard to put down. Skip this book unless you must absolutely must know a few obscure details of Livermore's life and don't mind fluffy embellishment.

People who don't understand TA, have no concept of what this excellently written book is saying. I derived over 12 pages of trading notes. Yes, it's an biography on JL who was a classic manic depressive and desperately needed to take Prozac. If he lived through this market crash, he would have been richer than Gates and Buffet put together, and a whole lot happier.
Read in to this book and you will derive the secret to market success.

If you already own or have read 'the amazing life of jesse livermore', skip this one. except for the its title and certain minor editing, this book is almost identical to the latter.

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

Richard Smitten's biography of speculator Jesse Livermore spans his life from childhood to Livermore's death in 1940 and fills in the personal details that Edwin Lefevre did not cover in his famous 1923 account of Livermore's career "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator". Half of this book takes place after 1923, so we learn about the last leg of Livermore's career as well, including his great success in the Crash of 1929. I mention "Reminiscences of a Stock Operator" because it is a better book. Lefevre was a talented writer who was able to lend his protagonist more personality, his exploits in the market more excitement, and go into more detail about the development of Livermore's trading philosophy than this biography does. It's an expertly crafted page-turner. But "Reminiscences" left me wondering what Jesse Livermore was like outside of the markets and why his life ended so tragically. This book answers some of those questions. Livermore was an introverted, private man who left little record of his personal life, which is frustrating, but Richard Smitten was able to piece together a sort of half-portrait. I knew more after reading this book than I did before, but Livermore's character is still elusive.

A lot of the information in this biography was gleaned from contemporary articles, from books written about Wall Street of the 1920s, and from Livermore's own "How to Trade in Stocks". But much of the personal information is exclusive to Smitten's book, gotten from interviews with Livermore's son Paul, in particular, and Jesse Livermore, Jr.'s widow Patricia. The book's treatment of Livermore's financial ups and downs is somewhat cursory, but it paints an interesting picture of his 14-year second marriage former Ziegfeld Follies showgirl Dorothy Wendt, and their "Evermore" estate on Long Island, including stories of Dorothy delivering beer to the neighbors during Prohibition and their 1927 jewel robbery at the hands of the Boston Billy Gang. Most of Smitten's presentation of Livermore's market philosophy is confined to chapter 12, "Livermore's Money-Management Rules", and to the Appendix. The last 8 years of Livermore's life were tragic, as he found himself unable to trade. Smitten doesn't get into the speculation about the nature of Livermore's mental health problems, but simply tells the reader what happened during those years.

Jesse Livermore had an extremely interesting life. It is too bad, then, that Richard Smitten's biography of Livermore was so poorly written and edited. Smitten has the extremely bad habit of telling us in advance of major events in Livermore's life so that when we get to these events chronologically we have generally been told about them multiple times. Also, there are many references to people where names are incomplete or where a nickname is used and then noted on a later page. The best parts of the book concern Livermore's trading and his rules and they make the book worth readng despite its many weaknesses.