wilte 's review for:

Reminiscences of a Stock Operator by Roger Lowenstein, Edwin Lefèvre
4.0

Timeless, hard to believe it was written in 1923, still contains many relevant truths for the stock current market. Reads like a cinch (=easy) to use parlance of the book.

Livermore starts in bucket shops, sort of the equivalent of FX trading a century ago.

"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 man can always have adequate reasons for buying or selling stocks daily—or sufficient knowledge to make his play an intelligent play."

"The market does not beat them. They beat themselves, because though they have brains they cannot sit tight."

"I cleared about three million dollars in 1916 by being bullish as long as the bull market lasted and then by being bearish when the bear market started. As I said before, a man does not have to marry one side of the market till death do them part."

"The manipulator to-day has no more need to consider what they did and how they did it than a cadet at West Point need study archery as practiced by the ancients in order to increase his working knowledge of ballistics. On the other hand there is profit in studying the human factors—the ease with which human beings believe what it pleases them to believe; and how they allow themselves—-indeed, urge themselves—-to be influenced by their cupidity or by the dollar-cost of the average man’s carelessness. Fear and hope remain the same; therefore the study of the psychology of speculators is as valuable as it ever was. Weapons change, but strategy remains strategy, on the New York Stock Exchange as on the battlefield."

"People who look for easy money invariably pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this sordid earth."

I read the free version via Gutenberg; https://archive.org/details/JesseLivermoreReminiscencesOfAStockOperator

My Kindle clippings:
http://wilte.tumblr.com/post/86027765801/reminiscences-of-a-stock-operator-1923