- Lefevre, Edwin.
Reminiscences of a Stock Operator.
New York: John Wiley & Sons, [1923] 1994.
ISBN 0-471-05970-6.
-
This stock market classic is a thinly fictionalised biography of the
exploits of the legendary speculator Jesse Livermore, written in the
form of an autobiography of “Larry Livingston”. (In 1940, shortly
before his death, Livermore claimed that he had actually written the
book himself, with writer Edwin Lefevre acting as editor and
front-man; I know of no independent confirmation of this claim.)
In any case, there are few books you can read which contain so much
market wisdom packed into 300 pages of entertaining narrative.
The book was published in 1923, and covers Livermore/Livingston's
career from his start in the bucket shops of Boston to a millionaire
market mover as the great 1920s bull market was just beginning to take
off.
Trading was Livermore's life; he ended up making and losing four
multi-million dollar fortunes, and was blamed for every major market
crash from 1917 through the year of his death, 1940. Here is a
picture of the original wild and woolly Wall Street—before the SEC,
Glass-Steagall, restrictions on insider trading, and all the other
party-pooping innovations of later years. Prior to 1913, there were
not even any taxes on stock market profits. Market manipulation was
considered (chapter 19) “no more than common merchandising
processes”, and if the public gets fleeced, well, that's what they're
there for! If you think today's financial futures, options,
derivatives, and hedge funds are speculative, check out the
description of late 19th century “bucket shops”: off-track betting
parlours for stocks, which actually made no transactions in the
market at all. Some things never change, however, and anybody who
read chapter 23 about media hyping of stocks in the early decades of
the last century would have been well cautioned against the “perma-bull”
babblers who sucked the public into the dot-com bubble near the
top.
July 2005 