Thread by @stockifi_Invest

A Mega-Thread on the Legendary American stock trader and the pioneer of day trading:

Jesse Lauriston Livermore

Would appreciate a Retweet as it helps us educate more investors

1) Jesse Lauriston Livermore was born on July 26, 1877 in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts and was the youngest of his parents’ three children, he had a sister named Mabel Loraine Blethen and a brother called Elliot Livermore.

2) His father, Hiram Brooks was a farmer.

3) An intelligent child, he learned to read and write at the age of three and a half.

4) By the time he was five, he was reading newspapers including the financial pages.

5) In his grammar school, he showed excellent talent in numbers, especially in mental mathematics, completing three years’ mathematics syllabus in just one year.

6) But as he turned fourteen, his father pulled him out of school to employ him at the farm.

7) The move devastated his mother who put him on a carriage with the clear instruction that he should be dropped off far away.

8) Jesse managed to convince the driver to drop him off at Paine Webber, a stockbroker in Boston where he managed to get a job as a board boy.

9) Working as a board boy was an ideal job for Jesse Livermore since it involved writing down the prices of shares on a chalkboard as soon as they came through the tape.

10) Very soon he was tracking them down in his journal, finding a pattern in the numbers.

11) In 1892, at the age of 15, he took his first plunge, betting $5 on Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad at a bucket shop, which allowed customers to bet on stocks and securities without actually owning them. He earned $3.12 on his first bet.

12) By sixteen, his earnings from the bucket shop far exceeded his income from Paine Webber. Consequently, he started trading full-time at the bucket shop, sometimes under disguise, always making profits.

13) By 1899, Jesse Livermore had made $10,000 and with that, he moved to New York City, where he began trading at the Wall Street.

14) But very soon, he lost the entire sum because the ticker’s tape was lagging by 3-4 minutes, making it impossible to make a correct decision.

15) After losing heavily at Wall Street, Jesse borrowed $500 and he moved to St. Louis to trade in virgin territory.

16) After a successful run, he returned to New York with $2,500, repaid his $500 loan and decided to trade on both the NYSE and the bucket shops.

17) In 1901, he returned to Wall Street, bought in Northern Pacific Railway, shortly turning his $10K into $500K.

18) In 1906, he took a bug short position on Union Pacific Railroad. The next day, San Francisco was hit with a terrible earthquake, earning him a $250,000 profit.

19) In 1908, he had his second fall when on the advice of a commodity trader named Teddy Price, he began to buy cotton, not knowing that Price was actually selling his shares. As a result, he lost almost 90% of what he had made in the previous year.

20) After 1908, his losses began to grow and eventually he accumulated a debt of $1 million.

21) In 1915, he was forced to declare bankruptcy. But shortly, he was offered a trading facility of 500 shares, which he used judiciously, and by 1917, he was back on Wall Street.

22) In 1918, he began to invest heavily in cotton, trying to corner the market; but gave it up at the request of President Woodrow Wilson, who had invited him to the White House.

23) In the early 1930s, because of some personal problems, he began to lose mental equilibrium.

24) With the launch of the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission in 1934 his trading was also affected.

25) In 1934, he declared bankruptcy for the second time and his membership at the Chicago Board of Trade was suspended.

26) In 1937, he was in a position to pay off his $800K tax bill and in 1939 he opened a financial advisory business, where he sold a technical analysis system.

27) In October 1900, at the age of 23, He married Nettie Jordan of Indianapolis. However, they separated shortly after that and ultimately divorced in 1917.

28) On December 2, 1918, he married 22-year old Dorothy Fox Wendt, a former Ziegfeld girl in Ziegfeld Follies.

29) They had two sons, Jesse Livermore II and Paul Livermore.

30) In 1933, he married 38-year-old singer and socialite, Harriet Metz Noble. They remained married until his suicide in 1940.

31) On November 28, 1940, Jesse Livermore killed himself with an Automatic Colt Pistol in the cloakroom of Sherry-Netherland hotel in Manhattan. He was then sixty-three years old.

32) At his peak in 1929, Jesse Livermore was worth $100 million, which in today's terms roughly equates to $1.5 billion.

33) Once he was one of the richest people in the world; however, at the time of his suicide, he was in huge debt.

34) "The nature of the game is such that the one must realize that the truth cannot be told by the few who know."

36) "Set your rules and stick to them; never argue with the market; never bet what you can’t afford, Above all, don’t be a sucker."

Hit Retweet of the first tweet.