A more subtle but if not more important question for professional traders to ask is: If Livermore was so great, why did he ultimately lose his fortune again during the Great Depression and why was he not able to make a "comeback" again? This and the fact that Livermore had periodically suffered from depression throughout his life finally led to his suicide in 1940. What went wrong? Traders would often cite his lack of risk management, but I think it goes deeper than that. Perhaps he was getting older and lost his drive, but I believe there is a more important underlying theme and lesson to all this. I will discuss this in later paragraphs.
Early on, Jesse Livermore learned that in order to succeed in life, one needs to put in a great deal of time and effort to an endeavor that one enjoys doing. Of course, it didn't hurt that Livermore also had a great genius with crunching numbers and a great discipline for keeping records. It also didn't hurt in that Livermore was always willing to learn and was always receptive to new ideas. As a young lad, he chose the stock and commodities market as a way to keep score and to make his fortune, and this is what he did until the day that he died.
Livermore was a self-made man. He ran away from home at the age of only 14 and subsequently went to work as a quotation boy in Boston. He quickly learned the art of "reading the tape" and from here, he proceeded to trade in the bucket shops - and was so successful that he was practically banned from trading in all the major bucket shops in Boston. From the bucket shops, he relocated to New York and started trading on the Big Board in the office of E. F. Hutton. This was in the year 1897. By that time, Livermore had already gained a reputation as the "Boy Plunger" in all the bucket shops in Boston. He was only 20 years old.
Trading "legitimately" on the NYSE taught Jesse Livermore his first major lesson in how to consistently make money in the stock market. How? Within six months of opening his account in a legitimate brokerage firm, he had lost all his money - all $2,500 of it - approximately the equivalent of $60,000 in today's dollars. The average person will most probably swear off stock market speculation forever if he was to lose his entire fortune in the endeavor, but not so for Livermore. Of course, he was depressed. Any emotional being would be depressed on losing his entire fortune. But this unfortunate development only motivated Livermore to study his mistakes more carefully. He was able to beat the game in the bucket shops, so why not on the Big Board?
There are many lessons to be learned here. Let's start with the first lesson. Please note that I am not going to list them in any particular order. Each trader/speculator has to deal with their own trading flaws - some lessons may be more applicable than others to one trader but the same lessons may not apply to another type of trader - especially so if he has conquered them.
Shut down the Pink Sheets for good.Call your congressman,FINRA,SEC etc.Let your voice be heard so that this scam exchange can be shut down,once and for all:)
