It should be added to your excellent post that Jesse was NOT a market timer. He was a stock speculator. Huge difference.
ampu
Jesse was NOT a market timer...
Jesse Livermore is considered by many of today's top Wall Street traders as the greatest trader who ever lived. For the first time, in one book - his trading secrets, techniques and stock market methods are revealed. Livermore broke new ground in trading the market. His timing techniques, money management systems, and high-momentum approach to trading in stocks and commodities were revolutionary and remain valid today.
Livermore ran away from home in 1891 at 14 years of age, with five dollars in his pocket, and immediately started as a board boy in the offices of Paine Webber. He made so much money he was banned from the 'Bucket Shops' of Boston and New York.
He made a fortune in the crash of 1907, and later lost it, only to make it and lose it several more times.
In the panic of 1907, J.P. Morgan personally implored Livermore to stop selling-short, stop pounding the market into oblivion. He made 3 million dollars in one day during the panic.
He married a beautiful Ziegfield Follies showgirl. They lived in a magnificent mansion on Long Island with 14 servants and a three hundred foot yacht anchored off the back yard that ferried him to Wall Street every morning. He sold the market short before the crash of 1929, and entered the depression with $100 million in cash. A mysterious secret trader, he worked out of a palatial penthouse, a highly secure office fortress on Fifth Avenue. Where he traded in absolute secrecy. Once the market was open no one in the office was allowed to speak until the market closed.
In 1935, Dorothy, his beautiful wife, shot their son, Jesse Livermore Jr., in a heated, drunken argument in Santa Barbara. It was one of the great scandals of the era. Jesse Livermore ended his own life with a self-inflicted bullet to the brain, ending one of the most dynamic careers in Wall Street history. A complex genius whose life ambition was to win on Wall Street, and he did.
He died broke. He was a market timer, a gambler. He died broke.