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The King Of Wall Street In The Roaring Twenties
With the stock market all the rage these days with share prices hitting record high after high in 2020, Jesse Livermore’s story is an interesting tale worth revisiting.
At the peak of his trade, Jesse Livermore was one of the most famous traders of his day. His trades were sensational news copied by people all around the world. He famously made million-dollar fortunes three separate times, and duly lost it all each time. Given that a million dollars then was much more than it is worth now, this was a huge feat.
Early Gambler
Jesse Lauriston Livermore was born in 1877. He was the youngest child of a farming family in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts. By the age of three, he was reading and writing, and by five he was reading newspapers. He showed an exceptional talent for numbers and excelled at his grammar school. However, at 14, his father pulled him from school to work at the family farm leading him to run away to Boston with five dollars in his pocket.
His first job was to operate a ticker tape for Paine Webber, a stock brokerage firm. Here he got an early exposure to the glamour of the stock market. Being too young to open a brokerage account, he instead…
