How to Trade in Stocks

The Success Secrets of a Stock Market Legend

Jesse Livermore was a loner, an individualist-and the most successful stock trader who ever lived. Written shortly before his death in 1940, How to Trade Stocks offered traders their first account of that famously tight-lipped operator’s trading system.

Introduction:

THE career of Jesse L. Livermore is a bright patch in the pattern of speculation. He has been in the public eye as a stock-market factor almost continuously since as a youth l1e flashed like a comet across the speculative skies and became known as the millionaire Boy Plunger. He has indeed been a plunger, and on rare occasions the magnitude of his operations caused The Street to blink in wonderment. Yet blind chance never entered into his market sallies. Each move was touched with singular genius, buttressed by endless research and the dogged patience of Griselda.

For forty years Jesse Livermore has studied world and domestic economic conditions with almost fanatic intensity. In the same four decades he has studied, talked, dreamed, lived with, and traded in speculative markets. His world has been the movement of prices; his science the correct anticipation of such movements. It has been my privilege to know personally some of the great speculators of our times and to observe at close range their fascinating activities. For intellectual scope and for natural aptitude I regard Jesse Livermore as the greatest speculator and market analyst since the turn of the century.

In one of my books I made the statement that he could be shorn of every dollar, given a small brokerage credit, locked in a room with tickers, and in the course of a few active market months he could emerge with a new fortune. Such is the mark of his genius. He created l1is first sensation when he was fifteen years old. His motl1er was the party most surprised, for he dumped into her lap a thousand dollars in five dollar bills, his first gleanings from the stock market.

He created his next sensation by completing four years of mathematics in a single year while holding a job as board marker in a brokerage house. He has been creating market sensations ever since, and to those interested in the science of speculation this little book, if not a sensation, is at least a surprising departure. The reason is obvious. Every great speculator has his own n1etl1od of operation, his own course of study for arriving at conclusions upon which he is willing to risk vast sums of money. Such methods are guarded like state secrets, sometimes through vanity or suspicion, but more often for very practical reasons.

So when Jesse Livern1ore, with characteristic frankness, draws back the curtain and reveals publicly his rules for combining time element and prices he takes the spotlight for audacity among the topflight speculators of the age. He lays before the reader the fruits of forty years of speculative study.

Contents:

• THE CIHALLENGE OF SPECULATION
• WHEN DOES A STOCK ACT RIGHT?
• FOLLOW THE LEADERS
• MONEY IN THE HAND
• THE PIVOTAL POINT
• THE MILLION DOLLAR BLUNDER
• THE THREE MILLION DOLLAR PROFIT
• THE LIVERMORE MARKET KEY
• EXPLANATORY RULES
• CHARTS AND EXPLANATIONS

How to Trade in Stocks: The Livermore Formula for Combining Time Element and Price By Jesse L. Livermore PDF