Wall Street Stories By Edwin Lefevre

The book that launched Edwin Lefèvre’s literary career, Wall Street Stories is considered by many to be his most memorable work, second only to Reminiscences of a Stock Operator, his classic fictionalization of the life of Jesse Livermore. Published to great critical acclaim in 1901, Wall Street Stories is a literary romp through the habits and customs of Wall Street. Like all of Lefèvre’s fiction it is firmly rooted in the facts as he knew them both as a top financial journalist and a successful investor, and, as was his style, many of the fictional characters in the stories are thinly-veiled portraits of well-known Wall Street personalities such as James R. Keene, Elverton R. Chapman, Roswell Pettibone Flower, and Daniel Drew-names as familiar to the public in their day as Warren Buffet, George Soros, and Julian Robertson are today.

Introduction By Jack Schwager:

Edwin Lefèvre is best remembered for his classic work, Reminiscences of a Stock Operator. Reminiscences was one of Lefèvre’s later works, his penultimate one to be exact, published in 1923. Wall Street Stories was Lefèvre’s first book and preceded Reminis-cences by 22 years.The same writing skills and insights into the psychology of trading that have made Reminiscences a timeless financial work were already well developed in this much earlier volume. A review in the New York Sun put it succinctly: It is the one book about Wall Street that hits the mark . . .

For those who are curious, the original sell-ing price was $1.25. Although all of Lefèvre’s financial books are works of fiction, they are almost invariably based on real personalities, often thinly dis-guised. In fact, in his day, it was a bit of a parlor game for Wall Street professionals to attach the real names to the characters in Lefèvre’s books. Reminiscences was a fictionalized biography of Jesse Livermore. Lefèvre did such a remarkable job of capturing the mind-set of the professional trader and the eternal truths of trading that I recall, when I first read the book nearly 25 years ago, many read-ers at the time mistakenly believed that Lefèvre was a pseudonym for Livermore. I’m not sure if this mis-conception persists today, but it is easy to see how it first arose.

Personally speaking, Lefèvre provided me with a goal when I wrote my first Market Wizards book. I clearly recall thinking in reference to Reminiscences, “Here I am reading this book 60 years after it was written, and it still rings absolutely true in today’s markets.” My goal and my hope was to write a book that would emulate the spirit of Lefèvre’s work in maintaining truth and relevance many years after it was written. In this sense, I feel indebtedness to this financial writer of an earlier age who served as a personal inspiration. I am therefore quite pleased to play a role in sparing one of Lefèvre’s other works—this volume of Wall Street Stories—from “out-of-print” oblivion and helping to bring it to modern readers.

Contents:

• THEWOMAN AND HER BONDS
• THE BREAK IN TURPENTINE
• THE TIPSTER
• A PHILANTHROPIC WHISPER
• THE MAN WHO WON
• THE LOST OPPORTUNITY
• PIKE’S PEAK OR BUST
• A THEOLOGICAL TIPSTER

Wall Street Stories By Edwin Lefevre pdf