Thought For The Day

[Prices] are never too high to begin buying or too low to begin selling.
Jesse Livermore

 

I did exactly the wrong thing. The cotton showed me a loss and I kept it. The wheat showed me a profit and I sold it out. Of all the speculative blunders there are few greater than trying to average a losing game. Always sell what shows you a loss and keep what shows you a profit.
Jesse Livermore

 

I noticed that in advances as well as declines, stock prices were apt to show certain habits, so to speak. Jesse Livermore

 

I learned early that 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. I’ve never forgotten that.
Jesse Livermore

 

I’d go during my lunch house and buy or sell – it never made any difference to me. I was playing a system and not a favourite stock or backing opinions.
Jesse Livermore

 

I had a hard time convincing her [my mother] that I was not gambling, but making money by figuring.
Jesse Livermore

 

I knew something was wrong somewhere, but I couldn’t spot it exactly. But if something was coming and I didn’t know where from, I couldn’t be on my guard against it. That being the case I’d better be out of the market.
Jesse Livermore

 

In the old days whenever a bucket shop found itself loaded with too many bulls on a certain stock it was common practice to get some broker to wash down the price of that particular stock far enough to wipe out all the customers that were long of it. This seldom cost the bucket shop more than a couple of points on a few hundred shares, and they made thousands of dollars.
Jesse Livermore

 

I didn’t always win. My plan of trading was sound enough and won oftener than it lost. If I had stuck to it I’d have been right perhaps as often as seven out of ten times.
Jesse Livermore

 

I always made money when I was sure I was right before I began.
Jesse Livermore

 

What beat me was not having brains enough to stick to my own game – that is, to play the market only when I was satisfied that precedents favoured my play.
Jesse Livermore

 

There is a time for all things, but I didn’t know it. And that is precisely what beats so many men in Wall Street who are very far from being in the main sucker class. There is the plain fool, who does the wrong thing at all times everywhere, but there is the Wall Street fool, who thinks he must trade all the time. No many can always have adequate reasons for buying and selling stocks daily – or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play.
Jesse Livermore

 

Whenever I read the tape by the light of experience I made money, but when I made a fool play I had to lose. I was no exception was I?
Jesse Livermore

 

In a bucket shop where your margin is a shoestring you don’t play for long pulls. You are wiped too easily and quickly.
Jesse Livermore

 

The desire for constant action irrespective of underlying conditions is responsible for many losses in Wall Street even among the professionals, who feel that they must take home some money everyday, as though they were working for regular wages.
Jesse Livermore

 

I did not know then what I learned later, what made me fifteen years later, wait two long weeks and see a stock on which I was very bullish go up thirty points before I felt that it was safe to buy it. I was broke and was trying to get back, and so I waited. That was in 1915.
Jesse Livermore

 

A stock operator has to fight a lot of expensive enemies within himself.
Jesse Livermore

 

I always looked young. It was a handicap in some ways but it compelled me to fight for my own because so many tried to take advantage of my youth. The chaps at the bucket shops seeing what a kid I was, always thought I was a fool for luck and that that was the only reason why I beat them so often.
Jesse Livermore